Commercial information providing system and commercial information providing method

A commercial information providing method for a commercial information providing system including a user interface comprising at least one of a physical or virtual button, a physical or virtual keyboard, a mouse, an icon displayed on electronic display device, or a microphone capable of accepting input of question information representing a question from a user, a non-transitory computer readable storage device including a knowledge database holding knowledge data including a plurality of sets of commercial information related to commercial facilities and a plurality of response templates of responses to question information input from the user interface, an administrator interface comprising at least one of a physical or virtual button, a physical or virtual keyboard, a mouse, an icon displayed on electronic display device, or a microphone capable of accepting setting of a priority level to prioritize providing a specific set of commercial information among the plurality of sets of commercial information, a searching and providing engine including a control device communicatively connectable to the database, and an information providing device configured to output one or more of an audio or visual signal, the commercial information providing method comprising:

• upon the control device reading computer readable instructions received from the non-transitory computer readable storage device, the control device performing the control steps of:
• connecting, by the control device, to the knowledge database;
• extracting, by the control device, a set of commercial information to be provided from the plurality of sets of commercial information and a response template to be used from the plurality of response templates based on the question information input from the user interface;
• and
• creating, by the control device, response information using the response template, the response information including a set of commercial information selected based on the priority level from the extracted the set of commercial information;
• and
• an information providing step of providing via an output one or more of an audio or visual signal, by the information providing device, the response information created by the control device to the user;
• wherein the knowledge data stored in the database is further composed of a plurality of units, each including a reference text query that is compared with an input text query, and a response text that is associated with the reference text query,
• wherein the reference text query is associated with information comprising one or more of:
• a predetermined response condition, which is a condition on information input from the information providing device, other than the input text query, for selecting a response text from among a plurality of response texts to be sent to the information providing device;
• a predetermined response behavior setting, which is information for defining a behavior of the information providing device when a selected response text is received by the information providing device;
• and,
• a predetermined applicability setting, which is information for specifying whether the reference text query is to be a suggestion and/or whether to record the input text query into a log;
• and,
• wherein data to be included in the response text is based on the auxiliary information associated with the reference text query and a semantic closeness of the input text query and the reference text query being greater than or equal to a predetermined threshold.