Sara Lipowsky, Solution Engineer at Oracle, gave a demonstration of an Oracle Digital Assistant that pulls live data from several sources. The chatbot in this example was built for the internal finance team at an insurance company, so put yourself in the shoes of a busy finance director. You’re in and out of meetings all day and making influential decisions. Luckily, those decisions are based mostly on data.

However, when your data is located on multiple dashboards on dispersed systems, accessing the numbers you need can be tedious. You could have all of these dashboards open on multiple windows and tabs, but that can often be overwhelming. What if you’re on the go or in a meeting and need access to your data right then and there? These are some of the pains that today’s finance directors face.

The solution is Oracle Digital Assistant.

In just one, centralized location, using natural dialogue, the finance director can ask the Oracle digital assistant for the data that he or she needs. There will be no more digital scavenger hunts for data.

Demonstration of the Oracle Digital Assistant Finance Chatbot

Sara showed an example of a website with an Oracle Digital Assistant that lived in the bottom right corner of the screen. The logo and the entire dialogue window are completely customizable—allowing the customer to maintain a cohesive brand between the digital assistant and website.

When Sara asked the digital assistant, “What is my underwriting profit and loss by business segment?”, the chatbot responded with a full breakdown of profit and loss for each business segment.

She then asked, “What s the acquisition ratio for Q3 by region?” The chatbot was easily able to pull this information and even provided graphs for each region in a carousel format within the chat. Under each graph, it clearly stated the ratio for each, so the user didn’t have to click or analyze the graph for the information. However, there are included links to the dashboard in Oracle Analytics Cloud attached with each graph.

Sara also showed how you can speak to the chatbot less formally and without having to always phrase things in question format. She simply typed in “region with highest loss ratio,” and the chatbot was able to quickly give an answer back. The built-in natural language processing capabilities make this conversational method possible.

Even if you misspell words, the natural language processing capabilities will understand what you are trying to say and give you the correct response. When Sara was looking for the loss ratio for the current quarter, she typed in “loss ration for currnt quartr,” but the chatbot still knew what she meant and gave the answer she was looking for.

Notional Architecture

The notional architecture behind this starts with the user—in this case, the Finance Director. He or she can access the Oracle Digital Assistant through a website on a desktop or mobile device. It can also be integrated with a voice-enabled system, Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc.

Moving forward, Oracle has the Digital Assistant and Mobile Cloud Platform. The Oracle Digital Assistant Platform is where utterances, intents, entities, embedded containers and more are created. The Mobile Hub is the backend where connections can be made to any application that uses exposed REST API endpoints. In the example given in the video, connections were made to Oracle Analytics Cloud, Oracle APEX, and Oracle ERP Finance Cloud.

Oracle’s APEX acts as a middleman and allows the creation of connections to REST API endpoints and use of sequel queries to grab the data that is needed from the database.

Connections to these applications are like LEGO pieces. They are interchangeable, and you can easily add connections to other third-party applications through API endpoints.

Digital assistants are no longer limited to be scripted or FAQ bots. They are a robust tool used to empower users by giving them easy access to all of their data in one centralized location by using natural dialogue. Learn how to build your own chatbot with Oracle Cloud here.

To see Sara’s demonstration of the Oracle Digital Assistant finance chatbot, check out the video below.