Alessia Sacchi

Simple Polling: a basic Polling Web App built using Oracle Visual Builder CS Visual Applications

Polls. Surveys. Live Voting. It’s all about gathering live responses in any venue: conferences, concerts, classrooms etc.. There’s a proliferation of tools (including online tools) to create and conduct polls: “Download the mobile app today and be ready for your next interactive class or event tomorrow“.

For those who don’t know the difference between a poll and a survey a poll is used to ask one simple question while a survey is generally used to ask a wide range of multiple questions. … How tedious are those questions?

If the point is obtain information do we want to bother our attendees with 10 questions (that they are not likely to answer) or do we want to ask 1 small, simple and quick question? Well, being an attendee myself I think polls are way more powerful and effective than surveys so I thought a simple responsive Polling Web App was a good excuse to put my hands on Visual Builder and get familiar with the Visual Applications. This post assumes you’re familiar with Visual Builder Cloud Service – if you’re not reading Carlos’ latest post Teaching How to Get Started with Oracle Visual Builder 2.0 is certainly a good idea. Continue reading “Simple Polling: a basic Polling Web App built using Oracle Visual Builder CS Visual Applications”

What if in the middle of the conversation the user changes mind?

Bots that can survive human contact

User: "Wats PaaS?"

Bot: "Oracle Cloud Platform has the most comprehensive suite of PaaS 
solutions to help you increase business agility and drive innovation in 
the cloud. The most popular are Integration Cloud, Mobile & Chatbots and 
Blockchain"

User: "Oops! I meant SaaS"

Bot: "Oracle Cloud Platform has the most comprehensive suite of [....]

User: "Sure... See you later"

I believe machines are very good at doing repeatable and predictable tasks. Humans by nature are everything but predictable. This is why it takes a lot of work to build a Bot that can survive human contact….

This post is a deep technical dive into sub-intents, System components and how we combine them to build a dialog flow that attempts to maintain a conversation even when the user “goes off script”.

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Let’s all raise a cup of coffee to toast the success of Oracle Mobile and Chatbot!

A few years ago, Oracle unveiled Oracle Mobile Cloud Service (MCS), the first step in our ambitious mobile-first strategy. MCS enjoyed tremendous success, in some cases helping customers garner industry accolades for their mobile apps. Both Forrester and Gartner recognized MCS as an industry leader. Impressive? You bet. But it was only the beginning.

“Oracle is in the Leaders quadrant this year, which is a move from the Challengers quadrant in 2016. Oracle has achieved a significant increase in MADP sales, primarily from its Oracle Applications installed base. It continues to build on its platform with chatbot support and expanded analytics, and to enhance its high-productivity development tool” (Gartner)

Just a few weeks after launching Oracle Cloud Platform for Mobile and Chatbots Oracle earns a spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Mobile App Development Platforms.

No matter what your favorite hot drink is – whether you’re a flat white person or a short macchiato or a ‘long-black-with-a-dash-of-hot-milk” like me today I’d like to conduct a bit of an experiment with you. Have you ever asked a Conversational Bot driven by AI to order coffee for you? No? Well today you can with the Oracle Coffee Bot! Are you ready?

Hopefully you have a Facebook account. If you don’t I’m sorry at the moment the CoffeeBot is available for the following channels: Facebook Messanger and Amazon Alexa. We’re working to make it accessible from a simple Web Page or within a Mobile App.
Search for @anzcoffeebot in Messenger to find the page easily or open the CoffeeBot Page in a separate tab and click “Send Message”. This Bot was originally built for Telstra Vantage hence the name “TelstraCoffee” 🙂
Well now all you have to do is ask your “BaristaMadeBot” what you’re after and just converse with it!
Has the Bot submitted your order? Awesome! We’ve received your order, you can see it yourself here. If there was a Barista serving coffee now at a Coffee Cart near you you’d enjoy your coffee or tea. Don’t worry the ANZ Digital Experience team wants to meet you, so we’ll try and set up a Coffee Cart powered by the Oracle Coffee Bot in your city. Just let us know!

I hope you had a bit of fun with the Bot. If you want to know what runs in the “backstage” of the Coffee Bot and how Oracle Mobile Cloud enables you to build intelligent chatbots that connect to any backend system please continue reading. You won’t be disappointed!

Continue reading “Let’s all raise a cup of coffee to toast the success of Oracle Mobile and Chatbot!”

Entities and Intents: crawling through Natural Language Processing

“I’m afraid that the following syllogism may be used by some in the future.

Turing believes machines think
Turing lies with men
Therefore machines do not think

Yours in distress,

Alan”
(Alan Turing)

The journey started five months ago when I went to Bangkok to attend the Intelligence Chatbots Masters Training run by Oracle Product Management. Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to dive deeper into the world of Natural Language Processing. While I think it’ll take me a while to transition from crawling into walking through this fascinating world I’m happy to start sharing my findings.

This blog is about Entities and Intents which are the key building blocks for Natural Language Processing.

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Application Builder Cloud Service 17.1.3: Creating Custom Connectors for REST Services

Recently Oracle has announced Application Development Platform 17.1.3 with useful new updates, enhancements and relevant announcements to a vast range of services in the Application Development portfolio, including Java Cloud, Application Container Cloud, Developer Cloud, Application Builder Cloud, Database Cloud, Exadata Express Cloud, and more.

Application Builder Cloud Service 17.1.3 comes with very interesting features including but not limited to:

On-device mobile app development with Oracle MAX (those of you who’re familiar with Mobile Cloud Service should remember that Mobile Application Accelerator used to sit on top of Mobile Cloud Service. Now a customer who has an ABCS account leverages a visual drag&drop development tool to create both rich Web and Mobile applications).
Connect to external REST services with pluggable Business Object Providers
Business Logic for custom data objects – triggers validations and more
In control availability Security at the row level Action on fields in the UI

This post covers what is available to create custom business object providers to connect to external web services and expose them as business objects. ABCS 17.1.3 has a built-in template that provides an example of how to use Application Builder APIs with no connection to real REST API. The extension I have used is a great starting point to showcase how to connect to a real REST Service for demo purposes only.

Continue reading “Application Builder Cloud Service 17.1.3: Creating Custom Connectors for REST Services”

Wellness First: an inside look at Beacon technology

“Just like lighthouses have helped sailors navigate the world for thousands of years, electronic beacons can be used to provide precise location and contextual cues within apps to help you navigate the world.” (The Google Beacons development team)

What I find thrilling about beacons is that in their simplest sense they are unaware of themselves or any devices around them and we – humans – are not aware of them. So how is possible that these tiny transmitters are being used to help people in their daily lives? According to reports, 5 million beacons attached to the walls around the world are used to offer great help to people with regard to an array of things like travel, shopping, parking, entertainment, transportation, inventory management, assets tracking, indoor navigation and at last but not least in the healthcare space through more efficient processes and improved patient-care.

Wellness First is a fictitious gym that utilizes beacons to improve the customer experience. In this post we’ll take a close look at the Ionic Framework Mobile App I’ve built that uses Estimote beacons to target a customer located near the room where a Yoga class is just about to start and offers an unbeatable discount.

Continue reading “Wellness First: an inside look at Beacon technology”