Digital assistants (DA) have evolved from basic tasks like placing online food orders, checking the weather, getting sports updates, and listening to music in the car. Digital assistants are becoming increasingly sophisticated! Many more use cases are guiding various market innovations in various verticals. Technological advances, increasing demand for outsourced assistance, increased focus on enhancing customer loyalty, the acceptance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, and improvements in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and the Internet of Things are all driving the global digital assistant sector (IoT). By 2024, the number of digital assistants will reach 8.4 billion units – a number higher than the world's population!

The University of Adelaide plans to achieve substantial growth in its student population within five years, and one of the teams responsible for achieving this very aggressive goal has a new staff member this year: a chatbot. It helps answer the critical question, "Am I eligible to attend the university?" Catherine Cherry, the school's director of prospect management, is putting innovative technologies to work to help meet that goal. The University of Adelaide uses a chatbot to let prospective students know whether they're eligible to apply. Prior to the introduction of the chatbot, the university's admissions office couldn't easily answer the eligibility question for prospective students from outside of Australia who were curious about whether they could attend.

Oracle has added AI voice commands to its Digital Assistant, offering users an alternative way to interact with its various business apps. The company on Tuesday also announced that the bot will integrate with Microsoft's work stream collaboration platform, Teams. Oracle's Digital Assistant was launched last year as an interface to its portfolio of enterprise software applications, which includes sales, marketing and human resource tools. The virtual assistant uses AI techniques such as machine learning and natural language processing and understanding to interpret user intent; it's designed to automate processes such as expense approvals and meeting re-schedules. The Digital Assistant was initially targeted at text interactions and embedded in various communication and collaboration tools such as Slack, WeChat and Facebook Messenger, as well as user websites and as a standalone mobile app.

Oracle just concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2019, its annual user conference hosted in San Francisco. Larry Ellison, Chairman and CTO of Oracle Corporation is more bullish about the company's cloud strategy than ever. Larry's keynote focused on the core differentiating factors of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. He claimed that only Oracle has the best cloud infrastructure, platform, and SaaS offerings. Ellison emphasized on the enhancements made to Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure, Autonomous Database, and some of the new services such as the Digital Assistant Bot and a Machine Learning platform.

Oracle announced availability of its AI-trained voice with Oracle Digital Assistant. Now, enterprise customers can use voice commands to communicate with their enterprise applications to drive desired actions and outcomes, enriching the user experience with conversational AI, simplifying interactions and improving productivity. "Enterprises are demanding an AI-powered voice assistant that understands their specific vocabulary and enables naturally expressive interactions for its users," said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. "Most of all though, enterprises value a highly secure AI-powered voice assistant that stores their business' sensitive data in Oracle's second generation cloud infrastructure." Built on Oracle's next-generation infrastructure, Oracle Digital Assistant applies AI with deep semantic parsing for natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and custom machine learning (ML) algorithms.

Oracle's digital assistant is now available in Microsoft Teams, the cloud hosting and services provider announced today. Oracle's AI assistant got several other updates today, including the ability to interact via voice commands, enterprise-grade security for voice recordings, and the ability to respond to more complex voice commands. The news was announced today at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. As part of the Microsoft Teams integration, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 users will be able to access Oracle enterprise bots from the Microsoft Teams App Store. "For enterprise customers, what we're enabling [them] to do now is they can easily try to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with their employees and colleagues and so forth with Microsoft Teams," Oracle VP of AI and digital assistant Suhas Uliyar told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

To help brands ensure that each and every customer interaction is data driven, Oracle has announced a series of new data-first updates across Oracle Customer Experience (CX) Cloud. The latest updates include new digital assistants for sales, customer service and marketing professionals, new data enriched B2B sales capabilities, and new industry solutions for telecom and media, financial services, and public sector. "The latest updates to Oracle CX Cloud are fueled by data and machine learning to help our customers take advantage of powerful data insights to get ahead of customer needs and ensure a positive, unforgettable customer experience" Rob Tarkoff, executive vice president, Oracle CX Cloud and Oracle Data Cloud said. Oracle CX is an integrated set of applications across marketing, sales, service and commerce. The latest updates to Oracle CX include enhancements to Oracle CX Unity, Oracle's enterprise-class customer data management platform, as well as: In addition, service teams leveraging Oracle Intelligent Advisor to model and deploy interactive advice can use the Oracle Digital Assistant's conversational UI to deliver rich data-connected self-service on chat channels.

Oracle today announced availability of its AI-trained voice with Oracle Digital Assistant. Now, enterprise customers can use voice commands to communicate with their enterprise applications to drive desired actions and outcomes, enriching the user experience with conversational AI, simplifying interactions and improving productivity. "Enterprises are demanding an AI-powered voice assistant that understands their specific vocabulary and enables naturally expressive interactions for its users," said Suhas Uliyar, vice president, AI and Digital Assistant, Oracle. "Most of all though, enterprises value a highly secure AI-powered voice assistant that stores their business' sensitive data in Oracle's second generation cloud infrastructure." Built on Oracle's next-generation infrastructure, Oracle Digital Assistant applies AI with deep semantic parsing for natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and custom machine learning (ML) algorithms.

Oracle's digital assistant is now available in Microsoft Teams, the cloud hosting and services provider announced today. Oracle's AI assistant got several other updates today, including the ability to interact via voice commands, enterprise-grade security for voice recordings, and the ability to respond to more complex voice commands. The news was announced today at Oracle's OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. As part of the Microsoft Teams integration, Microsoft Teams and Office 365 users will be able to access Oracle enterprise bots from the Microsoft Teams App Store. "For enterprise customers, what we're enabling to do now is [that] they can easily try to use Microsoft Teams to collaborate with their employees and colleagues and so forth with Microsoft Teams," Oracle VP of AI and digital assistant Suhas Uliyar told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

Footwear retailers are becoming more intelligent -- with artificial intelligence, that is. Independents and department stores can now apply conversational AI technology to all stages of their business using Oracle Digital Assistant, which was integrated with Oracle Retail solutions earlier this month. The Digital Assistant, originally launched in October at Oracle OpenWorld 2018, supports analysts by sourcing important data on demand so that employees can more effectively use their time. Conversational AI is frequently used on the front-end of retail, assisting customers online or aiding employees in-store. Simple chatbots that can answer direct questions are increasingly common across e-commerce platforms.