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

TL;DR

VerbalValue is an AI virtual host designed for live commerce, enhancing sales through expert knowledge, emotional intelligence, and engaging responses, outperforming existing models in informativeness and correctness.

Contribution

It introduces a domain knowledge base, annotated interaction data, and fine-tunes a large language model for commercially effective, empathetic responses in live commerce settings.

Findings

Achieved 23% improvement in informativeness over baselines.

Achieved 18% improvement in factual correctness.

Demonstrated increased viewer engagement and tactfulness.

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 VerbalValue, a sales-conversion-oriented virtual host that turns exceptional verbal ability into real commercial value, built on three contributions. First, we construct a domain knowledge base of product specifications and a curated sales terminology lexicon that anchor product-related responses in verified expertise. Second, we collect and annotate 1,475 live-commerce interactions spanning diverse viewer intents. Third, we fine-tune a large language model on this data to deliver empathetic, commercially oriented responses, adapting to viewer intent through empathetic amplification, evidence-backed rebuttal, and humor-mediated deflection. Experiments against GPT-5.4, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and other baselines demonstrate gains of 23% on informativeness and 18% on factual correctness, with consistent advantages in tactfulness and viewer engagement.