Understanding Skills

A skill (also known as chatbot) is a program, which simulates interaction with users like a real person via a chat interface. This is powered by certain rules which allows it to understand the requirement or data requested by the requester and then the program fetches the data or carries out a transaction. Skills are most useful for mundane and repetitive business transactions that involve predictable conversation paths. For example, ordering a pizza or checking your leave balance.

It brings in efficiency and cost savings to the business as it can service multiple requests at the same time on a large scale.

For more information on skills, see

https://www.oracle.com/solutions/chatbots/what-is-a-chatbot/

Video: PeopleSoft Digital Assistant Technology and Extensibility

PeopleSoft delivers setup pages which can be used to develop and deploy skills on PeopleSoft systems. Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) is leveraged to enable skills on PeopleSoft systems. For more details on Oracle Digital Assistant, refer to:

https://cloud.oracle.com/digital-assistant

A skill can be configured as a tile or as part of a widget to PeopleSoft application pages. It can also be accessed through external messaging client (like SMS client) by sending a message directly to the Twilio number of the skill.

Click the tile to launch the skill. You can start a conversation with the skill through the chat window.

The chat client window on a desktop device is launched as a modal from the tile which the user can use to chat with the skill. On a mobile device, the chat window is displayed as a standard page.