From Product Searches to Conversational Agents for E-Commerce

As consumers' demand for online shopping substantially increased in the last few years, e-commerce companies are still far from providing a high-quality user experience that may compete with in-store experiences. On the one hand, matching search queries with highly relevant products for discovery and browsing is still a challenge within existing search technologies. Available e-commerce solutions hardly provide tools to optimize product search relevance and fail to integrate user behavior signals into the search optimization pipeline. On the other hand, accessing the rich and complex information concealed in an e-commerce catalog through a search bar has not evolved far since its initial adoption. In this talk, we illustrate how the VUI conversational AI platform has been successfully adopted to both improve the user's experience quality with highly relevant search and discovery results and expand the traditional search bar with conversational agents' technology, enriching the user's experience at each stage of the e-commerce product life cycle. We review in depth some of the key deep learning models as part of the query understanding component and discuss the overall conversation architecture as it integrates with an existing e-commerce catalog. We include real-life demonstrations derived from use cases extracted from deployed systems.