Digital assistants are virtual devices that help users accomplish tasks through natural language conversations, without having to navigate the menus and pages of various apps and web sites. Each digital assistant contains a collection of specialized skills. When a user engages with the digital assistant, the digital assistant evaluates the user input and routes the conversation to and from the appropriate skills.

You can populate your digital assistant with skills from Oracle’s Digital Assistant Skill Store and with skills you have designed yourself.

You can make digital assistants available to users through a variety of channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, and your own mobile apps.

A digital assistant, for example, can respond to a complex request such as, “Schedule a flight to Phoenix for me next Sunday using my usual seating preferences, and arrange transportation to and from the airport.”

See Digital assistants in this FAQ for additional information.

Skills are individual functions that are designed to interact with users and fulfill specific types of tasks, such as ordering food, making flight reservations, changing contact information, requesting time off, looking up budget information, ordering a printer, etc. For details on designing a skill, Using Oracle Digital Assistant.

For example, PeopleSoft applications include the Employee Digital Assistant that comprises the Absence Skill, the Benefits Skill, the Expenses Skill, and many others.

PeopleSoft Intelligent Chat Assistant from Oracle (PICASO) is what we’ve branded the parent set of digital assistants designed and delivered with PeopleSoft applications. We leverage the digital assistant interface to provide one-stop access to your employees for related services. For instance, we have delivered the Employee Digital Assistant to serve employees with actions such as retrieving absence balances, viewing paycheck and benefit details, looking up employees in the organization, and may others through a single interface.

You can continue to call your deployed set of digital assistants PICASO or brand it using another name. It’s entirely up to you.

See PeopleSoft PICASO in this FAQ for additional information.

The PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework is a set of tools and content delivered by Oracle in PeopleTools 8.57.07 (and above) and PeopleSoft Update Images to support the digital assistant functionality. This framework connects PeopleSoft applications to the Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) platform. It includes the following:

• The chatbot user interface.
• A way to pass authentication from PeopleSoft to ODA.
• A framework for building RESTFul services used by ODA standards.
• Libraries of JavaScript that provide services to ODA.

Overall, the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework makes it easier to build and deploy skills or digital assistants in PeopleSoft that use ODA.

See PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework in this FAQ for additional information.

Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is Oracle’s technology to build chatbots. See Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) in this FAQ for additional information.
For more details, see Oracle Digital Assistant Platform and Overview of Digital Assistants and Skills.

A digital assistant provides a single point of access for related services by combining one or more skills. In addition, digital assistants offer an enhanced end-user experience with features like auto-generating help and handling interruption to flows and disambiguation.

For example, you can enter the data required for requesting time off and decide to look up something else using the digital assistant. Later, the digital assistant prompts you to complete the started time off request without having to reenter all the data.

PeopleSoft digital assistants operate in clustered and non-clustered environments. They allow your employees to interact with different or multiple skills in one session without losing the context.

For more details, see Overview of Digital Assistants and Skills.

PeopleSoft applications include the Employee Digital Assistant, which provides a unified experience for employees to get information on their payroll, absences, benefits, expense reports, item requisitions, and more. In addition, the Supplier Digital Assistant allows suppliers to inquire about business opportunities, and accomplish different tasks related to user registration and bidding events.

Access PeopleSoft PICASO as an ODA-provisioned button in the lower, right corner of most employee and manager self-service fluid components, homepages, and dashboards in PeopleSoft. There is no additional cost or licensing associated with PICASO.

See “Understanding PeopleSoft PICASO” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

No, the history of your chat conversation is maintained across PeopleSoft pages and components throughout your session. You can view previous chat interactions within the PeopleSoft application.

The PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework is built to standardize and increase the use of digital assistants and provides the following:

• A standard approach for security and integration allowing you to concentrate on application logic and conversational design.
• Seamless adoption of future security and integration changes in PeopleSoft applications and ODA while maintaining the conversational design layer separately.
• Easier maintenance of REST services (that is, the logic that encapsulates the application and externalizes it into APIs that can be used by third-party systems).
• A no-code approach when you create custom components.

The delivered PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework is designed to work with ODA. With the delivered integration framework, PeopleSoft-provided application skills and digital assistants are deployed with minimal add-on tasks.

Additionally, PeopleSoft delivers a skill template, which is a starter kit for developers to build their own application skills without having to also develop the integration, user interface rendering, and security.

ODA handles:

• Creating and maintaining channels that allow your users to access skills and digital assistants across multiple end points.
• Skills available in the Skill Store, which includes:
  • Conversational logic—that is, intents, entities, and utterances.
  • Skill dialog flow.
• Connectivity to the PeopleSoft application.

The PeopleSoft system manages:

• PeopleSoft data.
• Underlying application logic using the Application Service framework.
• The user interface for interacting with skills or digital assistants.

Yes, the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework is expressly designed to be used by Oracle-delivered skills as well PeopleSoft skills created by you or by Oracle partners. Refer to the published PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework red paper to understand how you can create your own skills using the foundation of the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework. In addition, see “Creating Bot Definitions” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

An application developer should have:

• A basic understanding of ODA.
• A basic understanding of developing a skill (for example, dialog flow, Apache Freemarker, and so on).
• A knowledge of JavaScript.

For more details, refer to the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework red paper on My Oracle Support. For ODA details, refer to the documentation for Oracle Digital Assistant on the Oracle Help Center.

ODA is delivered by Oracle as a platform as a service (PaaS) technology but can work with both cloud-based and on-premises applications. Refer to Oracle Digital Assistant on oracle.com for information on the technology platform.

Currently, ODA is trained for natural language processing by supervised learning. ODA needs to be manually trained. For example, ODA provides an easy-to-use feature known as Intents to help customers train ODA skills and digital assistants by mapping user utterances (what the user types in the chat window) to intents (what the user wants to do that is supported by PeopleSoft). For details, refer to Intents.

ODA must be licensed independent of your PeopleSoft applications. Talk to your Oracle Technical Sales Representative for more information about pricing. Visit Oracle Digital Assistant to learn more about the ODA platform.

PeopleSoft customers can license ODA by number of employees, by number of named users, or by round trip. For more information on pricing, please visit the Oracle Digital Assistant homepage.

Visit the Oracle Help Center for ODA documentation. The Oracle Help Center also includes an extensive list of tutorials on ODA for self-education.

The process of deploying a digital assistant is the same as for any skill.

See “Installing and Setting Up a Delivered Skill” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

The PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework (refer to PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework in this FAQ) is available to help customers and partners minimize the effort to build new skills and eliminate the need for customizations to handle security. The effort involved is ultimately based on how well your team knows both the integration framework and ODA. Since the feature is new, we do not have case studies or metrics on the level of effort.

Many trusted Oracle partners have already deployed skills, digital assistants, or both in the PeopleSoft enterprise environment. Contact your Oracle representative to find out who those partners are.

Deploying PeopleSoft skills and digital assistants do not require additional hardware.

The minimum software requirements are:

• Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) cloud-based subscription license.
• People Tools 8.57.07 (or higher) to leverage the delivered application services framework for processing application logic.
• For each PeopleSoft skill, the minimum update image requirements are listed in the Skill Store. Each skill description lists the prerequisites for implementing the skill.
• (Optional) If you are using PeopleTools 8.58.01 (or higher), you can leverage oAuth-based authentication with IDCS identity management services.

The messaging area or chat client is provisioned by ODA and is currently not accessible.

Yes. See “Adding Chatbot to Application pages” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

Yes, some of the UI constructs and branding elements can be overridden.

The chat client messaging UI area is ODA-provisioned. Refer to Customize the Chat Widget to learn more about the formatting features available in ODA Web SDK.

PeopleSoft systems provide a configuration page for customers to override these default features, with the added ability to assign a branding look for each configured skill or digital assistant.

See “Creating Bot Definitions” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

Yes, PeopleSoft PICASO provides the capability to combine cross-functional features in a single digital assistant.

Yes, you can add additional skills, either delivered by Oracle or custom-designed, to any digital assistant. The skill needs to be in the published mode before adding it to a digital assistant.

Yes, you can build your own digital assistant with delivered PeopleSoft skills, your custom-designed skills, or both.

Yes, you can delete or disable skills in a digital assistant up until the time they are published. You need to republish the digital assistant every time you change it.

Customers or partners can build and develop skills on their own. Oracle recommends using the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework so customer-designed skills are consistent with those delivered by Oracle. Using the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework also enables you to upgrade when changes in ODA or PeopleSoft applications are delivered in the future. We expect that over time, you may likely have a blend of both delivered skills and custom (or partner-delivered) skills working together in ODA.

Yes, there is a provision to do so within ODA. However, Oracle advises customers to integrate with trusted and reviewed services.

Yes, users can interact with PeopleSoft PICASO or other skills in non-English languages. ODA provides an option to allow users to use the multilingual support feature or a translation service. The service in turn uses the resource bundle to respond appropriately in the language chosen. See Languages and Digital Assistants for more details.

ODA supports speech input and voice narration features for the Oracle web channel. Refer to Response narration and Voice recognition for more details.

Technically, yes. ODA supports channels such as Slack and Facebook. For a complete list of ODA-supported channels, refer to Channel types.

Presently, PeopleSoft supports web- and Twilio-based text channel access.

PeopleSoft skills and digital assistants are secured using PeopleSoft user authentication mechanisms using the delivered integration framework. Therefore, only the PeopleSoft skills that do not need user authentication—that is, anonymous user service such as searching for jobs, training, and others—can be deployed on other channels. You have to build your own authentication support mechanisms to deploy PeopleSoft skills and digital assistants that require user authentication.

User conversation logs are not maintained in the PeopleSoft system. ODA provides a configurable option to enable conversation logging in the cloud.

The session is active for the duration of the user’s PeopleSoft session. The chat session terminates when the PeopleSoft session or token expires.

For PeopleTools 8.58 and higher, the authentication mechanism is oAuth, using IDCS.

The chat client (message window) uses the user’s PeopleSoft authentication. The PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework delivers a standard way to pass this user authentication from the PeopleSoft system to ODA for each instance of a chat. It is recommended that this process be used for all skills and digital assistant deployments.

Yes. PeopleSoft data security is extended to user interactions with skills or digital assistants. For instance, an employee is able to view their own absence data while a manager is able to view the data for themselves and their direct reports.

ODA natural language processing is a supervised learning model that needs periodic training with more and better utterance mappings to intents. ODA provides helpful metrics that help designers identify and localize incorrect user input to intent mappings, and incomplete or failed conversations to fine-tune or update intents. For more information on how to use these metrics, refer to the Insights reports and the Building and Training Intents: Best Practices tutorial.

For best practices, refer to Do’s and don'ts for conversational design.

The training data is manually entered, and skills are trained with the training models provided by ODA. ODA provides a set of reports called Insights that helps identify failed user utterances and provides a way to divert them to the correct intent. Refer to The Conversation Tester for details on testing your skill or digital assistant.

Yes. The responses are stored in the dialog flow. They can be replaced with custom responses. Additionally, the PeopleSoft Chatbot Integration Framework also delivers an application service that retrieves information from the PeopleTools Message Catalog. So, the responses can be added as Message Catalog entries for better maintainability.

For recommendations on creating qualitative utterance sets, refer to Data Manufacturing for information on how to crowd source creation of training data.

This is done in two ways:

• The skill designer identifies the most likely utterances that need to be mapped to every intent and trains the skill with those utterances.
• Any demographic or culture-specific words used within your organization would need additional training of the skill or the digital assistant. Use the ODA Insights reports to identify phrases that led to abandoned or unresolved paths. You add unique phrases, acronyms, or words that your employees may use frequently to a skill’s vocabulary.

The PeopleSoft Information Portal has a centralized repository that links to all the PeopleSoft PICASO and ODA documentation. The PeopleSoft Digital Assistants (PICASO) page can direct you to relevant documentation and videos on PeopleSoft skills and digital assistants.

In addition, training is available from Oracle University. Search term: digital assistant. Important: For complete results, search for digital assistant and not digital assistants.

You can access PeopleSoft skills and digital assistants from an SMS text client using an additional authentication mechanism that is similar to the PeopleSoft login.

To use PeopleSoft digital assistants using the Twilio-based text channel, you also need to acquire an SMS-enabled Twilio number. For more information, refer to Twilio/SMS in the ODA documentation to understand how a Twilio number is registered in Oracle Digital Assistant to connect to a PeopleSoft skill.

Not necessarily. Each channel must be configured with a unique Twilio number; however, a Twilio number can be associated with either a single skill or a digital assistant. Since a digital assistant can aggregate one or more PeopleSoft skills, you may not need a separate number for each skill.

Yes, it is possible to create new PeopleSoft skills and access those using the Twilio-based text channel. Please refer to the Setting up Twilio for PeopleSoft Chatbot for details.

The services provided by a PeopleSoft skill, whether accessed from the web or via texts to a Twilio-based number, remain the same.

The user experience differs slightly as text applications do not support a rich user experience such as card layouts and buttons. ODA provides similar capabilities for the text-only channel by providing features like auto-numbering and indexing. Refer to Twilio/SMS - Supported Capabilities for details.

PeopleSoft skills do not require a separate license. Any customer with a license to use Oracle Digital Assistant can access the PeopleSoft skills in the ODA Skill Store. In order to use PeopleSoft skills, you must have a valid PeopleSoft license and be current on maintenance.

Customers can license ODA either by number of employees, number of named users, or by round trip. Each of these options can be used for PeopleSoft. For more information on pricing, please visit the Oracle Digital Assistant homepage.

Once skills are delivered in the ODA Skill Store, they are no longer delivered in images. Any customer that has deployed a skill from an image may continue to keep using it as long as they want with the understanding that all new versions of the skill are delivered via the ODA Skill Store. We recommend that customers stop using the copied skills and migrate to the skills from the store. This gives customers the ability to extend the skills in a way that allows them to take new versions in the future.

Skills are delivered in the ODA Skill Store. Follow the ODA life cycle for skill deployment. Skill delivery in the ODA Skill Store is aligned with PeopleSoft Update Image timelines. Each skill description lists the prerequisites for implementing the skill.

However, the RESTFul services and application classes that support the skill are delivered in PeopleSoft update images.

See “Installing and Setting Up a Delivered Skill” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

Yes, but selective adoption will also include dependent changes and fixes if there is a hard dependency for the bug fixes you have selected.

Once you get an ODA Skill Store subscription, they can download PeopleSoft skills from the Skill Store. To migrate from your existing PeopleSoft-delivered skills to the corresponding Skill Store version:

• Install the required skill version from the ODA Skill Store.
• Use the extend feature to create a new extended version of the skill.
• (Optional) Manually merge any customizations from the existing PeopleSoft-delivered skill to the extended skill.
• Train the newly generated extended skill.
• (Optional) Customize the skill per organizational requirements.
• Publish the skill.
• Map the channel (or channels) to point to the new skill.

Note: This approach only applies to customers using skills from PeopleSoft Update Images who want to move to the Skill Store (recommended).

To use a PeopleSoft skill:

• Acquire a subscription to ODA.
• Install or upgrade to People Tools 8.57.07 or higher.
• Download the PeopleSoft skill from the ODA Skill Store. Each skill description lists the prerequisites for implementing the skill.

See “Installing and Setting Up a Delivered Skill” in the Documentation section of the Digital Assistants (PICASO) page.

PeopleSoft feature deliverables include:

• Skills and digital assistants that complement delivered PeopleSoft application features.
• Security mechanisms.
• Configuration pages to configure skills and digital assistants.
• User interface to access skills and digital assistants.

Depending on your organizational needs, you may need to update the conversational flow to accommodate how you have customized certain features. To customize a delivered skill, use ODA’s extend feature to create a skill with a new name and version from the delivered skill. Refer to Extending Skills for detailed instructions.

For better intent quality, you need to periodically train the skill with an additional body of utterances. Use ODA’s Insights feature to monitor and improve skill intent resolution.

Additionally, for value list entities (for example, absence name), add your organization-specific values in the entity value list by importing relevant values from your PeopleSoft system.

For skill changes:

• Install the new skill version from the ODA Skill Store.
• Open the previously extended and deployed skill and use the rebase feature from settings to merge any customizations in the extended skill with the updates in the new version. This creates a new version of the extended skill.
• Train the newly generated skill version.
• (Optional) customize the skill per organizational requirements.
• Publish the skill.
• Map the channel to point to the new skill.

Refer to Extending Digital Assistants and Skills for detailed instructions.

Application services need to be updated to adapt to changes in the underlying PeopleSoft application logic. For application service changes:

• A new application service is created if the changes to the application logic impact the existing service’s parameters or definition. In addition, skill conversational flow changes to react to the new application service. Oracle delivers the new application service in a PeopleSoft update image and the revised skill in the ODA Skill Store.
• For other changes to application logic that do not impact the application service definition or parameters, the existing service is updated and delivered in PeopleSoft update images.

Refer to the Chatbot Integration Framework red paper to understand how to work with custom components or create application services, along with development best practices.

You can post your questions, and share requirements and ideas at the PeopleSoft Ideas Lab.

If you want to actively participate in discussions about PeopleSoft PICASO, join the bimonthly focus group meeting. See PeopleSoft Focus Groups for more information on all PeopleSoft focus groups, including the PeopleSoft PICASO Digital Assistant focus group.

Like every other PeopleSoft feature, contact Oracle Support for ODA product support.