Conversational Commerce: An Introduction

In April 2020 I have started working on a new project to revolutionize how customers shop. For that purpose, we have written a blog post introducing Farfetch Chat (previously known as iFETCH), a conversational AI technology with multimodal capabilities developed by FARFETCH in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), and Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA). Farfetch Chat aimed to revolutionize the online high-fashion sector by providing a “physical store”-like experience through natural interaction using both textual and visual data. The project focused on four pillars: natural language understanding and generation, dialogue management, product catalog and multimodal knowledge base, and product retrieval.