Oracle Digital Assistant, part 1

4 min readSep 13, 2021

A series of articles on Conversational AI — A Chatbot That Sounds Human

Hello, how can I help you ?
Hi, I came by 3 days ago and I have a problem with this product.
Oh ok, do you have the ticket ?
No sorry, I threw it out
No worries, give me your name and I will try to find your purchase
….

This conversation, in a human-to-human context, looks normal. You bought an item in your local store, and following a problem you return to the store and a natural conversation starts between you and the person who welcomes you.

In most online stores, it’s often a winding road to find a way to reach customer service, be patient while waiting for someone to answer, to retrieve an order reference, to explain the problem by phone … For most of the online store, it is the same nightmare.

This is not good for anyone. You are disappointed and will not recommend this store to your friends, and this business will probably have lost a customer.

Now, think of the online store home page as the door to your local store. You walk in and we welcome you before asking how we can help you. This virtual door is no more less than a popup that comes from a bot, with a unique mission : providing the best answer to your question, in the easiest way, offering you the best experience. And to be more efficient, this virtual door has to be accessible from any channel (website, facebook, … ), immediately and securely. Sometime a bot cannot handle the conversation and there is a need for Human Intervention and instead redirect the chat to a human agent. That is the same situation where the first person in the local store is not able to help you and redirects you to another person.

Oracle provides a bot named Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA), an Enterprise-Ready Conversational AI, and ODA is provided by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

ODA is an Enterprise-Ready Conversational AI

I had the opportunity to start working on ODA a few versions ago hence this first article. By joining oXya, I also had the privilege to work on Google DialogFlow, so I will also talk about it later. And lastly, I’ve been also interested in Botkit these last few months. As a Nodejs developer I was interested to learn more about this open source developer tool for building chat bots, apps and custom integrations for major messaging platforms. There are plenty other platforms to discover, but I prefer to focus and reading more on use cases, best practices, …. Beyond the platform, the advantages to implement a chatbot are multiple.

Customers must start looking at using chatbots as engagement tools connected to other platforms. Chatbots Are Quickly Emerging as a Preferred Engagement Channel. The use cases are numerous and exciting.

Oracle Digital Assistant is open to any client channel or back-end app, on premises or in the cloud. Oracle provides prebuilt digital assistant skills (or chatbots) for Oracle Cloud ERP, Cloud HCM, and Cloud CX, as well as templates for on-premises apps that can easily be customized to your unique needs.

It can improve your omni channel strategy.

Powered by AI , Oracle Digital Assistant interprets the user’s intent, automating processes and delivering contextual responses to voice or text commands.

ODA applies deep semantic parsing (built-in machine learning) using natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and custom algorithms to understand natural conversation to derive accurate intent and context.

ODA unifies single-purpose chatbots (Skills) into one digital assistant making it easy for users to interact with multiple systems from one conversation.