Virgil — the AI shopping concierge
Conversational AI that quotes pricing, books consultations, and converts visitors 24/7.
Overview
Virgil is the AI shopping concierge embedded in every Katura storefront. It answers product questions, quotes custom pricing, surfaces inventory, books consultations, and creates checkout-ready carts — in any of Katura's 24 supported languages, 24 hours a day. Virgil is not a generic chatbot bolted onto your site. It is wired directly into your product catalog, CAD pipeline, calendar, and CRM, which means every conversation is grounded in your real data.
Where Virgil appears
- Storefront widget — a small avatar in the bottom-right corner of every storefront page.
/yendedicated page — a full-screen conversation experience for deep questions, sharing links, and embedding in email signatures.- Product page deep-links — Virgil can be opened with the active SKU pre-loaded, so it answers in the context of the piece the visitor is viewing.
- QR codes — generate a QR that opens Virgil with a specific consultation type primed (resize, custom, repair).
Capabilities
- Product Q&A — “Do you have this in 18k yellow gold?” → Virgil checks the variant matrix and answers with stock + price.
- Live pricing — for CAD-linked SKUs, Virgil pulls the current metal spot price and recomputes the quote on the fly.
- Sizing guidance — walks shoppers through ring-sizer, finger-circumference, and printable PDF options.
- Booking — opens a calendar slot from your
/admin/calendarand confirms via email + SMS. - Cart hand-off — when the shopper is ready, Virgil creates a real cart with the right variants and posts the checkout link.
- Escalation — when a question exceeds Virgil's confidence threshold, the conversation is handed to a human via the admin chat queue.
How Virgil stays grounded
Hallucination is the killer for any commerce chatbot. Virgil avoids it with three layers:
- Retrieval over your catalog — every reply is grounded in product, variant, and inventory rows pulled at request time.
- Tool-calls instead of free-text — when Virgil needs to quote a price or check stock, it calls a typed function rather than guessing.
- Refusal beats invention — when Virgil doesn't have a confident answer, it offers to book a human consultation instead of fabricating one.
Warning
Virgil will quote pricing, but it will not finalize an order over $5,000 without explicit human review. This threshold is configurable per-tenant in /admin/settings/yen.
Brand voice & customization
Configure Virgil's voice in /admin/settings/yen:
- Persona prompt — a short paragraph describing your brand voice (e.g. “warm, knowledgeable, never pushy”).
- Greeting — the first message Virgil sends when a visitor opens the widget.
- Topic guardrails — explicit allow/deny lists (e.g. never discuss competitor pricing).
- Languages — Virgil detects the visitor's language but you can pin it to one if your audience is single-region.
- Escalation routing — which human or Slack channel gets pinged when Virgil escalates.
Analytics & transcripts
Every Virgil conversation is logged in /admin/conversations with a full transcript, the tool calls Virgil made, latency for each turn, and the outcome (cart created / consultation booked / escalated / abandoned). You can replay any conversation, label it for training, or push it to your CRM as a contact note.