Dialoguing with an Online Assistant in a Financial Domain: The VIP-Advisor Approach

Virtual assistants are a promising business for the near future in the web era. This implies that the supporting applications have to be endowed with advanced capabilities to service offerings and to communicate with the users in a more direct and natural way. This paper presents the agent-based architecture of the virtual assistant and focuses on the dialogue module. The content exchange between the agents is based on communicative acts to cope with the complexity of unrestricted language used by human users communicating with online assistants. The assistant is capable to interact with users and to provide the right output through the exploitation of different information sources. The approach was applied and tested on the insurance field in the frame of the European research project VIP-Advisor.