The role of a natural language conversational interface in online sales: A case study

This paper describes the evaluation of a natural language Dialog-based navigation system (HappyAssistant) that helps users access e-commerce sites to find relevant information about products & services. The prototype system leverages technologies in natural language processing & human-computer interaction to create a faster & more intuitive way of interacting with websites, especially for less experienced users. The result of a comparative study shows that users prefer the natural language-enabled navigation two to one over the menu-driven navigation. In addition, the study confirmed the efficiency of using natural language Dialog in terms of the number of clicks & the amount of time required to obtain the relevant information. In the case study, as compared to the menu driven system, the average number of clicks used in the natural language system was reduced by 63.2% & the average time was reduced by 33.3%. 5 Figures, 15 References. Adapted from the source document