This page brings together resources for delivery and uptake of Oracle Digital Assistant. This material is a complete end-to-end leanring library including product features and best practices for developing chatbot skills and digital assistants.
This material can be used as self-paced learning or for delivery to customers, partners and your own development teams.
Complete End-To-End Training
The following section lists the complete end-to-end training.
Overview
This section givens a complete overview of the features of the platform and serves as a primer for those who are new to ODA and are looking for a broad understanding of what it does.
It then includes presentations on understanding the challenges of conversational project and how to design conversations.
- Oracle Digital Assistant Overview
- Planning and managing a conversational project
- An introduction to conversational design
- Conversational UX tips and tricks
- Oracle Digital Assistant Conversation Designer
Developing Skills
This material covers the core skills of building skills including the basics of domain knowledge, how best to train your model, QnA, expression in dialog flows and visual components in the conversation channel.
- Domain knowledge for building conversational interfaces
Build Your First Skill (simple starter tutorial)
Build the Perfect Digital Assistant for Your Business (Tutorial)
- Best practices in training your model
- Implementing QnA
- Entities
- Building a conversational dialog flow
- Using ApacheFreemarker to build richer conversations
- Understanding Dynamic Entities
- Real world entity extraction with composite bag
- Resolving entity values with system.ResolveEntities
- Rich UI with the common response component
- Using the common response component with composite bag
- Advanced common response component
Backend Integration
Integrating with backend services as a key feature of a digital assistant and this is achieved through custom components. Furthermore, custom components can be used to programmatically render responses back to the user via the channel.
- An overview of custom components
Custom component development and backend integration hands on tutorial
- How to develop custom components
- Custom component SDK
- Design practices for custom components
- Local debugging of custom components
- Developing custom components with Oracle Mobile Hub
Design Practices
This section introduces best practice designs for error handling,
- Error handling
- Preventing users becoming locked in an input loop
- Handling out of order messages
- Adaptive bot response design
Digital Assistant
The digital assistant provide the container in which skills can be assembled. It also takes responsibility for routing user requests to the correct skills.
- How the digital assistant routes requests to skills
Tutorial: Introduction to Routing in Oracle Digital Assistant
Other Features of ODA
Oracle Digital Assistant provides a range of feature to augment the functionality of skills including integration with other technologies.
- Agent integration: The two approaches
- Oracle Digital Assistant as an Agent
- Handing off to a human via Service Cloud
Tutorial 1: Integrate a Skill with Oracle Service Cloud Live Chat
- Instant apps: integrating Webviews in a conversation
Tutorial 1: Building Webviews for Local Deployment to Oracle Digital Assistant using Oracle JET
Article and Sample: How to Use Webviews to Integrate Remote Web Application
Channels Support
Users interact with skills and digital assistants through channels such as web pages, Facebook Messenger or other channels.
- The built-in channels in ODA
Web channel hands on tutorial (version 19.4.1)
(NEW!) Oracle Web hands on tutorial (version 20.x)
(NEW!)Tutorial: Secure Your Oracle Web SDK Chat (version 20.x)
- Understanding webhooks
- Oracle Web SDK
- Voice as a channel
- Application initiated conversations
- Integrated test framework for conversational unit testing
Language Support
You can build skills that can communicate with users in the native language of the user.
Security
Security for your digital assistant includes not only understanding how your skill authenticates and authorises users, but also information must be regarded as secure.
Insights and Analytics
Getting an insight into how your digital assistant and skills are performaning is a key factor for both developers and the business.
- Understanding insights
Investigating your digital assistant performance through insights hands on tutorial
Architecture
Learning about the building blocks in Oracle Digital assistant and how they relate to known pattern and principles
Fusion Applications
Understanding how you can integrate Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions with Oracle Digital Assistant
- Using Oracle Digital Assistant in an Oracle Fusion Apps environment
- NEW! Tutorial: Activate a Digital Assistant in Oracle Cloud HCM
Tutorials
Here is the full list of Oracle Digital Assistant hands on labs. Each labs is self contained and if required includes a starter skill or digital assistant.
Overview to Routing in Oracle Digital Assistant
In this one-hour tutorial you will use three pre-defined skills to create your own personal digital assistant (DA) on the Oracle Digital Assistant platform (ODA). You will also get hands-on experience tuning your digital assistant’s conversational capabilities and interaction style.
Tutorial: Introduction to Routing in Oracle Digital Assistant
Building a Simple End-to-End Skill
This tutorial is ideal for beginners or those new to ODA as it takes you end to end from building intents, entities, dialog flow then exposing it through a channel.
Tutorial: Building a simple end to end skill
Build the Perfect Digital Assistant for Your Business
In this lab, you'll learn how to work with skills and digital assistants in Oracle Digital Assistant.
A skill is an individual chatbot that is focused on a specific set of capabilities (e.g. helping customers order food from a specific restaurant). A digital assistant is a master chatbot containing multiple specialized skills.
When a user engages with the digital assistant, the digital assistant evaluates the user input and routes the conversation to the appropriate skill. You can populate your digital assistant with skills from the Skill Store and with skills you have designed yourself.
Build the Perfect Digital Assistant for Your Business (Tutorial)
Best Practices for Training Your Model
Training your model to understand language is as much an art as a science. However, to build a well functionaing language model you need to follow a number of best practices.
Tutorial: Best practices for training your model
Real World Entity Extraction with Composite Bag
In this tutorial you will explore the power of the composite bag in Oracle Digital Assistant which will allow you to build powerful entity extraction conversations including validation and error handling of entity extraction.
Tutorial: Real world entity extraction
Building a Rich User Experience with Common Response Component
In this tutorial you will learn how to build rich visual components to enhance the user experience.
Tutorial: Building a rich user experience with common response component
Custom Component Service Development
Custom components are reusable units of custom code that are added to skills in Oracle Digital Assistant to be executed at runtime in the context of a user-bot conversation. Integrating remote backend systems to a chatbot conversation is the most common usecase for developers to build custom components in Oracle Digital Assistant. In this tutorial you learn how to build custom components for deployment to Oracle Digital Assistant's local Node container.
Custom component hands on tutorial
Custom Component Service Local Debugging
Custom components for Oracle Digital Assistant are developed using JavaScript and Node.js. In this tutorial you learn how to debug custom component services in the context of a bot conversation in Oracle Dgital Assistant.
Custom component service local debugging hands on tutorial
Local and Remote Webviews
Using webviews, bot designers can integrate locally and remotely deployed web applications to support structured data entry into web forms, leverage existing web application capabilities, or provide UI widgets that are not present in a messenger.
Tutorial 1: Building Webviews for Local Deployment to Oracle Digital Assistant using Oracle JET
Oracle Digital Assistant Insights
Learn how Oracle Digital Asisstant Insights can help you identify problems with your Oracle Digital Assistant skills. This tutorial also shows how Insights can be used to identify and fix issues in your skill's understanding.
Tutorial: Oracle Digital Insights
Optimize Insights Reports with Conversation Markers
Deploying Your Digital Assistant Through a Channel
Two tutorials that step you through deploying your digital assistant through a Web page or Facebook Messenger.
Tutorial: Deploying a digital assistant through a Web page (19.4.1 version)
Tutorial: Secure Your Oracle Web SDK Chat (NEW! 20.x version)
Facebook Messenger hands on tutorial
Human Agent Integration
In this tutorials you learn how to add live agent chat functionality to an Oracle Digital Assistant bot conversation using the Live Chat of Oracle Service Cloud. You learn how to configure service cloud and how to initiate calls to human agent support within a dialog flow.
Tutorial: Integrate a Skill with Oracle Service Cloud Live Chat
Tutorial: Pass Customer Information to a Live Chat
Tutorial: Transfer a Chat Session to a Live Chat Queue
Application Initiated Conversation
Oracle Digital Asisstant bot conversations can be triggered from external events. In this tutorial you learn how to start a user-bot conversation using a REST call you issue from curl or Postman. Using the same technique, bot conversations can be started from mobile and wbe applications.
Tutorial: Application Initiated Conversation
Oracle Fusion Applications
If you have an Oracle Cloud HCM account that comes with a pre-provisioned instance of Oracle Digital Assistant, you also get an out-of-the-box digital assistant (called FADigitalAssistant) that includes a variety of skills for Oracle Cloud Applications. Among the skills in FADigitalAssistant is a skill for HCM, which enables users to handle various employee and manager tasks through a chat window, thus saving time for HR representatives. You can use that skill as is or you can extend it to answer more questions and handle company-specific terms and phrasing.
- Using Oracle Digital Assistant in an Oracle Fusion Apps environment
- NEW! Tutorial: Activate a Digital Assistant in Oracle Cloud HCM
Oracle Digital Assistant Documentation
There is so much more to say about Oracle Digital Assistant. You find the complete product documentation following the links below.
TechExchange Blog
The Oracle TechExchange blog complements the Oracle Digital Assistant product documentation with in-depth hands-on experience and code samples that cover common developer tasks. The blog is aimed at bot designers and developers alike.
Video Tutorials
Oracle Groundbreakers 2 Minutes Tech Tips
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what could a video be worth? From experience it seems to be better to show a short demo and an example instead of explaining things a hundred times or more. The Oracle Groundbreakers Blog is a VLog that collects technical tips from various product lines and technologies. Of course, we at Oracle Digital Assistant are happy to help. Click on the link below for an overview of our contribution.
Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Groundbreakers
Conference Sessions
For many, live sessions are more appealing than recoded training videos. In this section, we list conference sessions about Oracle Digital Assistant, we record during Oracle and user group events.
Making First Contact: Building Chatbots with Oracle Digital Assistant Technical Primer
In this Oracle Code event session, recorded in April 2019 in Berlin, Grant Ronald of Product Management gives you an introduction to Oracle Digital Assistant.
Oracle Learning Library: Developing Chatbots
This course introduces you to the world of intelligent chatbots and how you can build them quickly and easily with Oracle Mobile Cloud. You will learn how to develop a bot that understands natural human language using NLP (Natural Language Processing), enable your bot to use its intelligence as it interacts with users, integrate your bot with back end systems so that it can deliver enterprise data to users and execute tasks and introduce your bot to a potentially vast audience quickly and easily by integrating it with the Facebook Messenger platform.
Though this course focuses on a previous Oracle product, principles and fundamentals still applies to Oracle Digital Assistant.
Oracle Digital Assistant certification
Exam Title: Oracle Cloud Platform Digital Assistant 2020 Associate
Oracle Cloud Platform Digital Assistant 2020 Certified Specialist Certification Overview