At the annual OpenWorld Conference in San Francisco, Oracle not only took an aim at Amazon with its second generation of cloud data servers, but also surprised everyone with the release of its own chatbot development platform in the cloud. It imagines programmers hosting an army of these bots on its cloud one day.
It is another move by Oracle aimed at embracing a new and younger technology platform. Oracle chief executive and CTO Larry Ellison humbly took the stage to introduce Oracle’s newest innovation — a platform for building, testing and running chatbots. He introduced the new chatbot service as a platform,
upon which you can write chabots, and upon which Oracle writes chatbots.
It doesn’t require you to learn any PHP, Java or Javascript to start building your bots from scratch and allows you to start apps/bots creation by using a visual programming environment — where you can simply start by dragging and dropping code blocks into the interface. You can even use voice commands to do things using this platform, but the same was shown by Ellison in the keynote demo.
Using this development platform, you can easily do things like, check flight timing, book movie tickets, order or purchase products, or schedule tasks. Once you’re developing your bot, you can easily integrate it with different messaging ecosystems like Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack and more.
Ellison, using an iPad, demonstrated a chatbot for ordering business cards, accompanied with a joke about him not being a CEO anymore. He, though is the co-founder, stepped down from his chief executive role to work as the CTO in 2014. He used an Oracle Mobile Procurement Messenger chatbot to order some fresh business cards for himself.
He started off by inputing the ‘Reorder cards’ command and the chatbot responded with a card design to confirm if the order was correct or not. But, wait, that isn’t fun!? And this isn’t the end of the interactive experience of the chatbot.
The chatbot which was connected to the HCM system, then pulled up fresh information about Ellison’s position change in the company and this cracked up the audience. The chatbot is also aware of his recently change in cadre from CEO to CTO, thus giving him leeway to make a remark about his salary again. The chatbot asked if he’d like to change his designation on the business card and order them.
The chatbot then checked if he’d like to order 500 of those new CTO business cards to an existing shipping address, also picked up from the HCM database. Then, he finally placed the order and went on to say,
I could’ve just ordered a laptop, an iPad, schedule a meeting…there’s…you can do anything that you can imagine on this interface.
These chatbot platform, as he puts it, are more popular amongst the millenials who’re tech-savvy and engrossed in their mobile phones all day. This is kind of a new generation interface for building anything, and Oracle’s now in direct competition with other chatbots platforms, including Facebook, Microsoft and Kik.
Ellison did present us with everything, including a joke about this reduced salary, but no information about the pricing or availability was dispensed during the keynote presentation.
To see Larry Ellison make jokes about his salary and know more about the chatbot development platform, skip to about the 50 minute mark in the keynote video attached below:
