Oracle launches digital assistant for the enterprise

Oracle today announced the launch of the Oracle Digital Assistant for companies, an AI assistant built to help employees handle things like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), or human relations needs in a conversational setting. The Oracle Digital Assistant will be able to handle employee needs on popular chat apps like Slack, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat, as well from Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana. The announcement was made at Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco and follows a series of updates announced yesterday for Oracle ERP and cloud systems. Oracle Digital Assistant builds upon the Oracle bot development platform, which made its initial debut in fall 2016. Like other automated bots, Oracle's enterprise assistant derives intent from words using a combination of natural language understanding and natural language processing.