Towards virtual sales assistants: state-of-the-art and research challenges

The metaphor of a virtual sales assistant has become commonplace in many online shops over the past decade. It raises expectations that Web applications serve online customers in the same way as sales persons of brick & mortar businesses do. However, in reality this promise is rarely kept. In many online shops the term is misused and denotes simple search tools or static query forms that do not provide personalized interactive behavior - let alone a social or emotional perspective. The purpose of this talk is to give an overview on current state-of-the-art techniques for Web personalisation and user interaction with e-commerce platforms and present selected examples. Furthermore, current research results are given and challenges for future work discussed.