Notebook Expert may be able to interpret dozens of terms that in some way define weight (pounds, heavy, light, and so on). The concept of weight—and how much of it you want in a laptop—is stored in its own object, a smart chunk of computer code that combines with other objects so the expert brain knows your goals when it asks or answers its next question. The shopper isn't traveling down a flow-charted path. He or she is having a free-form dialogue with an entity that learns what the shopper wants and cleverly leads the way toward the cash register.

Online Brain: You mentioned that you travel. A lot of travelers like to carry an extra battery . . .

The shopper's goals are, of course, matched as accurately as possible to the goals of the Web site—which is to sell products. When working with potential clients, "We say, 'Just tell us what you want it to sell, what you want it to look like. Should it do a lot of cross-selling? Should it do a lot of upselling? Should it be laid back and chatty or more direct?' " Lucente says. "We meet with them for an hour, then we go off for two to three weeks and make visual changes and link it into their product database."

Behind the scenes, the software does what it calls Dialogue Mining, generating reports on the captured customer conversations that help merchants understand what people want. It can be simple enough: The sales bump that Acer got during its test of Notebook Expert came largely because the company learned customers wanted two laptop models that weren't on its site. The company quickly added them. The brain can get deeper into shopper psychographics: If 80 percent of customers buying a particular laptop asked first about weight and then about speed but never about price, the seller might figure that buyers of that model aren't highly price sensitive, and it might fetch a higher price.

Following up on Notebook Expert will be Desktop Expert, and Soliloquy is working on brains for other specialized areas. Each takes about two months to build, and each will borrow chunks of knowledge from the master brain Soliloquy is building. For example, the computer- buying expert's understanding of colors—that tangerine is a kind of orange and teal is a shade between blue and green—can be patched easily into a car-shopping expert.

Eventually the result will be a huge online brain that knows, well, a lot.

Then what? Voice and animated characters that eliminate typing are on the drawing board. A speaking computerized expert could vary its intonation to help customers along, Lucente says: "Should it sound happy? Should it sound insistent, confused? If there's an animated character on the screen, it might look at the person at a certain time or look away," depending on how it wants to interact.

The real question is whether the Soliloquy brain works better than flesh and blood. Online chat with live customer service representatives is relatively easy to set up. People come with brains and conversation skills of their own, and they're ready to work tomorrow.

"It reminds me of the original mentality of the Internet," says Robert LoCascio, CEO of LivePerson, whose software allows online chat with human helpers. "The Internet created the ultimate way not to touch a customer. Just to create more technology to do that, I don't think it's the answer." For kicks, LoCascio goes to the Notebook Expert demo screen that Soliloquy has on its site. He types "I want a computer with a broken screen," and the expert says it has found 711 matching laptops. "I'm just spoofing it," he says. "But, you know, obviously that's not something a real person would come back with."

On top of that, Soliloquy's ambitious technology is a tough sell. Though Lucente has been working on it for nearly two years, Soliloquy just signed its first paying customer last fall, a version of Notebook Expert for CNet's shopping site. By contrast, LivePerson, founded in 1998, claims to be used on 800 Web sites.

Still, Soliloquy's approach may ultimately be much less expensive—and is clearly more scalable than a human staff. Soliloquy's solution will cost a company six figures to implement, Winchester says, declining to be more specific. Live Person's fees are lower—$350 a month per seat for its chat software—but then you need to train and pay a staff of human reps.

And, of course, Soliloquy's brains will get harder to spoof. Betting on Lucente to make that happen is a no-brainer.