In Has AI made Intelligent Advisor obsolete? Nope! I explained how artificial intelligence (AI) and Oracle Intelligent Advisor complement each other. This post explores this further with an overview of integrating Intelligent Advisor with a chatbot that uses AI natural language processing (NLP) techniques to provide intuitive and rich experiences to your customers.

Intelligent Advisor rules are written in plain language (English, French, Spanish and so on) so are easy to share and review with other legal and policy experts. Because Intelligent Advisor can automatically generate from rules the text of interactive questions, Intelligent Advisor interviews can also be used to easily deliver a chat-based advice experience.

If you haven’t already, its worth familiarising yourself with Oracle Digital Assistant. Oracle Digital Assistant makes it easy to set up a chatbot that can recognize customer intent – that is, what they are trying to do – and provide a chat-based service that helps them complete that action. For example, to automatically start a product return when a customer types in a chat phrase like “my toaster is broken”.

Oracle Digital Assistant’s AI engine leverages NLP to provide the chatbot’s intent recognition and dialog handling, and to improve both of them, over time. Oracle Digital Assistant comes with built-in support for Intelligent Advisor interviews – allowing Intelligent Advisor and AI-driven chat interactions to work together.

Example

Let’s take the example of a chat service that allows customers to start a new car insurance policy:

  1. A business expert uses Intelligent Advisor to write all the rules about car insurance eligibility and premium calculations. They also define the order in which questions (if they are relevant) should be asked. They deploy this interview to Intelligent Advisor Cloud.
  2. The business analyst responsible for the chat channel creates an Oracle Digital Assistant intent for “New automobile policy”. This intent is configured to launch the integration with Intelligent Advisor and to use the car insurance interview.
  3. Once this intent is live, when a customer types in a chat phrase like “I want to know how much your car insurance costs”, the Oracle Digital Assistant NLP engine matches to the “start new automobile policy” intent and launches an Intelligent Advisor session.
  4. Oracle Digital Assistant brokers all interaction with Intelligent Advisor: it presents the text and questions that Intelligent Advisor decides are needed onto the customer’s chat channel. As well as presenting questions like “What make is the car?”, it can also let them know how far there is to go, with text like “I just need to ask a few more questions”
  5. During this process, answers provided by the customer are submitted back to Intelligent Advisor for it to decide what to say or ask next. The logic embedded within the Intelligent Advisor rules ensures only the necessary questions are asked, and any unnecessary questions are automatically skipped. For example, if the customer says they have not had an accident in the past 12 months, Intelligent Advisor would skip “I have a few extra questions about your last car insurance claim” and related questions.
  6. At the end of the Intelligent Advisor advice session, the customer is provided with a car insurance quote and can even start the insurance policy – all without needing to engage with a live person. Intelligent Advisor has applied all the rules, saved all the collected data back to the customer database along with an audit trail of how the premium was calculated and with generated documents to email to the customer as needed.

 

Overview of integration between Oracle Digital Assistant and Oracle Intelligent Advisor, showing chat Q+A coming from customer, through ODA, to OIA interview sessions, with option of CX or other applications as data source/store

 

Diagram of chat interaction with Oracle Digital Assistant brokering Intelligent Advisor sessions

 

During this interaction, Oracle Digital Assistant makes use of NLP to:

  • Convert terms and phrases such as “today” and “the day after tomorrow” into actual dates that are understood by Intelligent Advisor
  • Launch other intents when appropriate. For example, if the customer asks “what is my current home contents policy deductible”? it can temporarily branch out to a separate dialog that answers that question, before returning to the car insurance Intelligent Advisor session flow.
  • Hand off to another channel. For example, if the customer asks “can I talk to a real person”, the entire Intelligent Advisor session can be brought up in front of a live contact center agent, and they can help the customer finish the process that they have partially completed.

Getting started

Check out the documentation on integrating Intelligent Advisor with Oracle Digital Assistant. This provides links to everything you need to know, including:

Conclusion

In combination with Oracle Digital Assistant’s NLP capabilities an Intelligent Advisor-driven chatbot can deliver comprehensive and easily maintainable advice experiences on digital messaging channels.