Oracle is intent on enabling conversational intelligent assistants for business processes and workforce applications. Oracle has added AI voice commands to its Digital Assistant, offering a new way to interact with its enterprise applications including ERP, CRM and HR systems.

As part of an announcement at this week’s OpenWorld event in San Francisco, Rondy Ng, senior vice president with Oracle Applications Development said “integrating intelligent assistants and machine learning capabilities into Oracle ERP Cloud enables customers to reduce the number of mundane tasks for their employees.”

Oracle’s Digital Assistant was launched last year as an interface to its portfolio of enterprise software applications, which includes sales, marketing and HR tools. The intelligent assistant utilizes machine learning and natural language processing to interpret and understand user’s intent in order to automate processes such as expense approvals, IT help desk and employee collaboration.

The company has built its own NLP and grammar set to be better suited for domain-specific enterprise jargon in its cloud applications, said Suhas Uliyar, vice president of product management with Oracle. The AI voice systems are trained on common domain models, but fine-tuned so vocabulary can allow for expressive language and complex utterances. With the home-grown speech capabilities, the data associated with voice commands remains contained and secure within Oracle systems.

The Oracle Digital Assistant, using both conversational voice and text, has seen accelerated growth for not only employee applications such IT help desk and collaboration, but also in customer-facing support applications. One example is Hermes, a UK-based parcel and package tracker, which has been using the Oracle Digital assistant for customer service and witnessed 40% deflection rate of queries to human agents.

Also unveiled this week is Oracle plans to have its Digital Assistant integrate with Microsoft’s Teams collaboration platform. Enterprise customers will now be able to access Oracle Cloud Applications through a conversational experience. Also, skills from Oracle Digital Assistant are auto provisioned and auto configured for seamless integration.

Taken together, Oracle’s announcements show the promise of intelligent assistants to redefine CRM and sales technology strategies, digitize human workflows, improve collaboration and operationalize worker productivity. In our experience at Opus Research, enterprise customers can achieve long-term value and business efficiencies from conversational AI technologies with a commitment to balancing digital self-service opportunities with human intervention as needed.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles