A Conversational Interface for Online Shopping

Joyce Y. Chai, Veronika Horvath, Nanda Kambhatla, Nicolas Nicolov, Margo Stys-Budzikowska

Abstract: We present a deployed, conversational dialog system that assists users in finding computers based on their usage patterns and constraints on specifications. We discuss findings from a market survey and two user studies. We compared our system to a directed dialog system and a menu driven navigation system. We found that the conversational interface reduced the average number of clicks by 63% and the average interaction time by 33% over a menu driven search system. The focus of our continuing work includes developing a dynamic, adaptive dialog management strategy, robustly handling user input and improving the user interface.