The article deals with conversational natural language interfaces for electronic-commerce applications that appear on Web sites as sales "Experts," conversing with shoppers, answering their questions, and helping find products required. Experts appear to the shopper as a small conversation window on an e-commerce web page. Each expert combines several technologies suitable for mass-market e-commerce applications: speech recognition, speech synthesis, natural-language understanding, and the web. An expert begins the conversation by greeting and prompting the shopper for questions. The shopper speaks to the expert or types into the window. The expert may respond in several ways, including spoken, text or hyperlinked multimedia. This interaction is multimodal, which allows rich conversation and contextual development often exceeding that of human speech-only conversation. This system is in operation at Soliloquy Inc., and aims to educate experts, extending their personalities and intelligence. It presents a wonderful trend in software development, creating software that is a pleasure to engage.