SAMIR: Your 3D Virtual Bookseller

Intelligent web agents, that exhibit a complex behavior, i.e. an autonomous rather than a merely reactive one, are daily gaining popularity as they allow a simpler and more natural interaction metaphor between the user and the machine, entertaining him/ber and giving to some extent the illusion of interacting with a human-like interface. In this paper we describe SAMIR an intelligent web agent satisfying the objectives listed above. It uses: - a 3D face animated via a morph-target technique to convey expressions to be communicated to the user, - a slightly modified version of the ALICE chatterbot to provide the user with dialoguing capabilities, - an XCS classifier system to manage the consistency between conversation and the face expressions. We also show some experimental results obtained applying SAMIR to a virtual bookselling scenario, involving the well-known Amazon.com site