A Multimodal Shopping Assistant for Home E-Commerce

Electronic Commerce has rapidly grown with the expansion of the Internet. E-commerce has also become a promising field for applying agent and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Software agents help to automate a variety of tasks including those involved in buying and selling products over the Internet. In this paper, we describe a multimodal intelligent Shopping Assistant developed in the EMBASSI project. EMBASSI is a project involving more than twenty big German companies. The Goal of EMBASSI is not to focus on the unlimited possibilities of this technology, but rather on the individual prerequisites of the human in contact with it. Therefore, the user interfaces of a big class of appliances and systems, including shopping and e-commerce, need to be easily and efficiently accessible for everyone, taking into account psychological and ergonomic aspects and using innovative interaction techniques by realization of intelligent anthropomorphous assistants.