A user seeking information relevant to the purchase of a home improvement product or other product submits a query to an automated system. The system transforms the user's voice query into a text statement and searches a knowledge base for candidate responses. Quality scores for the candidate responses are determined. If no candidate response having at least a minimum quality score is identified, the query is sent to a second device associated with an agent. The agent response is provided to the user and stored in the knowledge base for future use.