As the world is becoming even more interconnected and digitized, chatbots are becoming customers’ and companies’ best allies. If you’ve noticed an increase in chatbot use, you’re not alone. More enterprise organizations are using them to automate aspects of the customer experience.

You’ve probably interacted with a chatbot whether you know it or not. For example, you’re at your computer researching a product, and a window pops up on your screen asking if you need help. Maybe you’re on your way to a concert and you use your smartphone to request a ride through chat. These are examples of scenarios in which you could be encountering a chatbot.

Oracle Digital Assistant

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Digital Assistant is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered text and voice interface for user interactions with applications on any channel using language of choice. Oracle Digital Assistant helps you in creating a conversational chatbots that enable your users to interact with your business applications that are running on different clouds or even on-premises at your data center.

Oracle Digital Assistant is superior to traditional chatbots in the following ways:

  • Chatbots are designed to simulate conversation with human users, but Oracle Digital Assistant recommends or completes tasks beyond simple conversations.

  • Chatbots are usually for single-purpose, but Oracle Digital Assistant is multipurpose. Oracle Digital Assistant unifies single-purpose chatbots into one digital assistant, making it easy for users to interact with multiple systems from one conversation. Conversations are contextual and personalized to individual users and roles.

  • Chatbots are usually user initiated and use AI for understanding conversations, but Oracle Digital Assistant can also be bot-initiated and uses AI for predictions and recommendations.

The problem

Chatbots enable your users to interact with your business applications in a conversational mode, but these backend applications might not all be deployed and running in the same place. When creating enterprise solutions, you might find that different business applications have been deployed in different clouds or even on-premises, because of specific needs or team preferences on cloud vendors.

If you then want to expose some of these application functionalities to your users as chatbots, you wouldn’t want to try operating multiple chatbots in different clouds that host your different business applications. It’s likely to be confusing to your users and makes it difficult for you to change applications when required.

Our solution

After proper network connectivity is established, Oracle Digital Assistant can easily connect to different backend applications running on different clouds, abstract the complexities of these services as required, and provide a conversational platform that your users can easily use in different conversational channels.

For your enterprise, your business applications can include the following applications:

  • Oracle software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, like Oracle Fusion Cloud applications or Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management

  • Applications running on OCI using OCI services, like Oracle Autonomous Database services

  • Applications running on-premises at your data center, like Oracle E-Business Suite application or JD Edwards application or Peoplesoft application

  • Containerized applications or SaaS applications running on other clouds, like applications that extend Office 365 may have been deployed on Azure

Your users can use different conversational platforms, including the following examples:

  • Slack

  • Microsoft Teams

  • Facebook Messenger

  • WhatsApp

  • Voice based channels, like Alexa

  • Text based channels, like Twilio and SMS

  • Web channels

Architecture

Digital Assistant architecture for multicloud applications

Solution components

Oracle Digital Assistant provides unique advantages that make it easy for you to develop chatbots, including the following:

  • Natural language understanding and machine learning: Oracle Digital Assistant applies deep semantic parsing using natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and custom algorithms to understand common conversations to derive accurate intent and context.

  • Visual conversational designer: With the Visual Flow Designer, dialog flows are designed visually instead of through a code editor. This lets business users design their own conversational experiences with a point-and-click, no-code dialogue flows interface.

  • Seamless integration with your multicloud business applications

    • For communicating with Oracle SaaS Applications, you can use prebuilt chatbot skills for Oracle Cloud ERP, Oracle Cloud SCM, Oracle Cloud HCM, and Oracle Cloud CX to get you started immediately.

    • For communicating with databases, you can use SQL Dialog that translates a user’s natural language input into SQL queries, send the queries to a backend data source, and display the response.

    • For generating answer intents from an existing structured knowledge resource, you can use Knowledge Document.

    • You can easily integrate to different backend business applications running on OCI or other clouds or on-premises using adapters of Oracle Integration Cloud.

    • You can connect to Rest and SOAP services of different backend business applications (running on OCI or other clouds or on-premises) using ODA Rest Connector or Node JS components.

  • Native multilingual support: You can add training data in multiple languages, such as Spanish and French, and skip external translation services to improve engagement and expand use beyond the English-speaking population. With Oracle Digital Assistant’s zero-shot multilingual NLU, you don’t need to recreate the same training dataset for each language. Also using dialogue and domain trainer, you can train the bot on custom domain vocabulary. Combining out-of-the-box training with human training further improves the assistant’s accuracy.

  • Multichannel support: You can engage users via popular channels already in use, such as the web, mobile, SMS texting, smart speakers, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and more. Users can start a conversation on one channel and complete it in another, without losing context.

  • AI-powered voice: You can eliminate reliance on third-party offerings with Oracle’s AI-powered voice. Users can communicate with their business application using voice commands with an assistant that understands their business-specific vocabulary and enables naturally expressive interactions. You can give your customers more control of their data by providing end-to-end security and compliance with privacy standards, such as PII and GDPR.

  • Automated bot-to-agent transfer: Oracle Digital Assistant integrates with Oracle Service and other help desk management systems to intelligently respond to service requests and offer best next-step recommendations. An effortless handoff of full call history to a live agent for more complex calls ensures greater customer satisfaction and improved service levels.

  • Integrated authentication profile: You can enable one authentication profile, so users have seamless but secure conversational access to different applications in the back end based on roles. Oracle Digital Assistant security is preintegrated with OCI applications to offer a single sign-on across applications.

  • Analytics and insights: You can have user insights through built-in analytics that identify conversational bottlenecks and usage patterns and make data-driven decisions that continually improve the user experience.

Conclusion

Oracle Digital Assistant makes it easy for you to create a conversational interface for your users that enables them to communicate in their own natural language (text or voice) using different channels. Oracle Digital Assistant empowers your users to interact with your business applications, both SaaS applications or custom applications, and those business applications can be hosted anywhere: On-premises in your data center, on OCI, or on other third-party clouds.

You can try the Oracle Digital Assistant on OCI. If you’re new to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, try Oracle Cloud Free Trial, a free 30 day trial with US $300 in credits.

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