Suppose your business offers multiple products and options for your customers. You want them to choose the right product that exactly fits their needs, using a wide set of information and content you already have. What if you could easily create an app that takes your existing, curated content and helps your customer make the right choice by asking questions through a chat? It’s possible – and to prove it, we’ve done it. Let us show you how.
Introducing Oracle DBExpert – an AI-powered expert resource app
Oracle offers a comprehensive portfolio of database services, available to deploy in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in your location with Cloud@Customer, and in multi-cloud environments such as Oracle Database@Azure. Choosing the best solution for your new deployment or migration project may involve many business and technical considerations, and collecting and evaluating all the information you need is not always a simple task.
As with many undertakings, the first step is often the hardest. Where to start? To assist you in taking the first step with a structured and guided discovery and evaluation process, our team created the website https://www.oracle.com/dbexpert, which provides up-to-date, curated information covering Oracle’s Database Management cloud services offerings.
The site’s main tools include:
- Information Viewers let you quickly explore Oracle cloud service and database capabilities
- Advisors, which take your requirements and instantly provide recommendations and estimated pricing
- Downloadable tools that let you analyze and report on your current Oracle estate
- REST API endpoints for information retrieval and exercising the advisors
The information viewers facilitate browsing and searching, while the advisors are user-driven interfaces that take inputs in pre-defined formats, such as select lists, radio buttons, and checkboxes, and provide appropriate guidance. These user experiences greatly simplify the process of selecting a service and deployment model.
How natural language conversations revolutionized app user interactions
Many application users want a natural-language interface to evaluate and compare different products – wouldn’t you want to do that while evaluating the Database Management services? So we made it happen!
Since we have a large amount of curated information to leverage as the input for answer generation, and our application is an Oracle APEX instance running on Autonomous Transaction Processing Serverless database, the new Select AI feature that simplifies integrations of LLMs into apps was an obvious choice. We discovered that with some minor enhancements to our data, we quickly saw good results for a wide variety of natural language questions.
Next, we needed a frontend to Select AI so that we could gracefully handle content-related questions, requests for help and user feedback, and integration of more information sources in the future. For that, Oracle Digital Assistant – delivering a complete AI platform to create conversational experiences for business applications through text, chat, and voice interfaces – proved to be the answer.
With Oracle Digital Assistant, we quickly created a chat interface for our APEX application, and provided the Select AI functionality in a structured, portable and extensible format with conversational flows and user-friendly responses. By leveraging our curated data with Select AI, our Oracle Digital Assistant implementation provides evergreen, helpful responses to a large range of natural language questions.
It’s your turn to make your apps talk – follow the steps in the Tutorial
Does DBExpert and its AI-powered capability sound great? Do you want your apps to have a similar capability? You can do this, too! We present the steps to connect these technologies to help you enhance your APEX apps in the same way. See the tutorial for a step-by-step guide for connecting the technologies.
Enabling Natural Language Queries adds Value to Your Data
By combining three strategic Oracle technologies, we rapidly introduced useful and extensible AI capabilities into our application with a natural language interface that can be used in other applications and websites. Over time, we will expand the scope of the data handled with Select AI and are looking at additional sources of information we can access through our Oracle Digital Assistant instance.
We hope you have a moment to visit our site and try out the chatbot. It accepts user feedback, so please let us know what you think.