Farfetch partners with Portuguese universities to develop ultimate chatbot

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
May 28, 2020

Farfetch has launched a €2.3m project to create the next generation of chatbots in partnership with Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Instituto Superior Técnico.

Co-financed by the Portuguese Government, through Portugal 2020, the initiative will pump funds and resources into iFetch, a technology that aims to revolutionise the way luxury e-commerce retailers interact with consumers.

The project is part of the Carnegie Mellon University Portugal program.

Luís Carvalho, VP Architecture at Farfetch, said: “There’s still a lot to explore in the area of ​​multimodal chatbots and I believe that this is a project with enormous potential. iFetch can bring significant innovations to online shopping very soon, allowing users to access information in a more natural way, and helping them to make better purchasing decisions”.

Leveraged by scientific advances, iFetch is developing conversational agents that interact with consumers with a multimodal interface. This means that rather than just offering text-based conversations, the chatbots will incorporate more types of human-machine interactions, making the experience seem more natural and friendly. The ultimate goal is to provide a customer service experience similar to that of a physical store.

“We have a multidisciplinary team with enormous skills and elements from renowned universities. Farfetch has already shown in other projects that it highly values ​​this connection to the community, and I think it will do it again now in a project with the potential to revolutionize the online shopping experience of millions of consumers,” Luís Carvalho continued.

iFetch has an expected completion time of three years.