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/her 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 wellknown Amazon.com site.