Ottilie: A Socially Intelligent Virtual Host for Sales-Driven Live Commerce

Abstract

A skilled live-commerce host is not merely a narrator, but a sales agent who converts viewer curiosity into purchase intent through expert product knowledge, emotionally intelligent response tactics, and entertainment that serves as a vehicle for product exposure. Yet no existing AI system replicates this. Conversational recommenders treat recommendation as a terminal act, while general-purpose LLMs hallucinate product claims and default to generic promotional templates that fail to engage or persuade. We present Ottilie, a sales-conversion-oriented virtual host for Chinese beauty live commerce that grounds product responses in a verified knowledge base, adapts discourse strategy to viewer intent through empathetic amplification, evidence-backed rebuttal, and humor-mediated deflection, and supervises all four output fields simultaneously within a structured generation framework. Experiments demonstrate gains of 14% on informativeness and 5% on factual correctness, with consistent advantages in tactfulness and viewer engagement. Ottilie has been deployed as an autonomous English-language host on Twitch, where the same fine-tuned model runs unattended on a single commodity GPU and promotes the company's own product; we report how the system adapted to a new language, market, and product without retraining, and what the deployment revealed about latency and adversarial chat.

arXiv comment10 pages, 7 figures. An earlier version, titled "VerbalValue: A Socially Intelligent Virtual Host for Sales-Driven Live Commerce", was accepted to the CVPR 2026 HiGen Workshop (non-archival). This version extends it with a deployment study