Oracle Introduces Natural Voice Conversations to Digital Assistant and Enhances Deep Learning Semantic Parser to Handle Complex Linguistic Constructs

Oracle announced availability of its AI-trained voice with Oracle Digital Assistant. Now, enterprise customers can use voice commands to communicate with their enterprise applications to drive desired actions and outcomes, enriching the user experience with conversational AI, simplifying interactions and improving productivity.

“Enterprises are demanding an AI-powered voice assistant that understands their specific vocabulary and enables naturally expressive interactions for its users,” said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. “Most of all though, enterprises value a highly secure AI-powered voice assistant that stores their business’ sensitive data in Oracle’s second generation cloud infrastructure.”

Built on Oracle’s next-generation infrastructure, Oracle Digital Assistant applies AI with deep semantic parsing for natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and custom machine learning (ML) algorithms. This combination allows Oracle Digital Assistant to understand a user’s natural conversation, derive intent, produce compositional logical forms, and identify and learn user behavior patterns in order to proactively take action on behalf of the user. A no-code tool that allows enterprises to build conversational experiences, Oracle Digital Assistant can also integrate with human agent work-flows and business processes without any coding required.

Oracle’s intelligent voice assistant for the enterprise brings conversational AI to new applications by analyzing enterprise-specific and domain-specific vocabulary on which open and consumer-oriented domain models are not trained on. Oracle Digital Assistant, the only enterprise digital assistant on the market today, makes voice and user interactions more expressive by processing complex queries and deriving intelligence from all available enterprise applications, such as ERP, CRM and HR systems to respond in the context to the request made.

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The NLP engines that power today’s traditional messaging-based channels lack the ability to handle highly expressive sentences. Voice interactions, however, enable expressive conversations which require NLP engines to manage much more complex constructs. Linguistic constructs like relative clauses, comparatives, superlatives, negation, anaphora, ordinals, cardinals, superlatives, ellipsis, quantifiers and conjunctions now need to be processed by the NLP engines that require more sophistication than the simple intent classification and slot-filling engines available today.

Oracle Digital Assistant NLP now comes with a semantic parser that understands these complex linguistic constructions and produces compositional logical forms that go beyond slot-filling. A sales key account manager can, for example, use Oracle Digital Assistant to schedule a lunch meeting with the Key Account Director or “KAD” and locate the most convenient parking garage for the meeting. Asking the Oracle Digital Assistant to “Find the address of the closest parking garage near the Japanese restaurant by Japantown’s Peace Pagoda” will return directions to the nearest parking garage not the Japanese restaurant. In addition, the acronym “KAD” is a contextual and enterprise-specific term which consumer-grade voice systems typically misinterpret. Oracle Digital Assistant is uniquely able to distinguish enterprise- and domain-specific vocabulary that various HCM, ERP and CX systems use regularly.

Oracle Digital Assistant is pre-built with AI-trained enterprise skills across ERP, SCM, HCM and CX and can connect to multiple back-end systems simultaneously to orchestrate user interactions across various application skills. With these plug-and-play skills, line-of-business users only have to interface with one digital assistant that can source the right information from employee directories, expense management systems or an assortment of other enterprise applications, including Oracle Cloud Application offerings. Oracle Digital Assistant can also be deployed to popular conversational interfaces, such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, WeChat and across voice interfaces like Siri and Alexa.

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Customer Spotlight

Customers in various industries showcase the power of Oracle Digital Assistant.

“We consider voice powered assistants to be a game-changing element with our customers,” said Kumar Thakur, principal architect, Exelon Utilities. “No apps to download or launch, just simply talk to the Oracle Digital Assistant, just as if you’re talking to the help desk and get your problems addressed automatically. When you scale that to millions of customers, the savings are easy to see.”

“Deploying the chatbot is going to make significant savings this year,” said Chris Ashworth, CIO, Hermes. “Oracle Digital Assistant now handles 38 percent of our customer queries providing us with significant cost savings and an increase in our customer satisfaction levels.”

“We will be using Oracle’s new voice recognition technology to ‘understand’ the beekeeper’s spoken words,” said Sabiha Malik, founder and executive president, The World Bee Project CIC. “We have developed ‘The World Bee Project Bee Assistant’ in collaboration with Oracle.  The new voice recognition technology does radically improve the ease and accuracy of hive inspections as beekeepers are guided by voice responses and can effortlessly record the data from their inspections. Thanks to this contribution from Oracle, we will be able to use our ‘World Bee Project Bee Assistant’ to help beekeepers and bee-keeping farmers worldwide to develop best beekeeping practices to improve the health of their bee colonies by better understanding the relationships between bee health, hive conditions and hive environments.”

“Oracle Digital Assistant has given us tremendous results by helping to scale up our service delivery to prospective students,” said Catherine Cherry, director, Prospect Management, University of Adelaide. “Our International Eligibility chatbot has enabled us to improve our student experience for international students. With this brand-new service, we are able to answer the most critical question prospects will ask us – ‘am I eligible?’ – 24/7 around the globe. In terms of business outcomes, the Eligibility chatbot allows us to extend our workforce and deal with higher enquiry volumes. It is also bringing us new leads from new geographic markets and leads that have a qualification level that would not be possible to gather any other way at the speed and scale of the chatbot. The new sophisticated voice capabilities of Oracle Digital Assistant offer us the ability to extend this new service to our second most used channel – phone – which simply would not be possible for us without a virtual agent.”

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