Understanding Benefits Assistant
A chatbot is a computer program that maintains a conversation with a user in natural language, understands the intent of the user, and sends a response based on business rules and data of the organization. The Benefits Assistant is a PeopleSoft chatbot created for the Benefits users. This chatbot is designed to assist employees in looking up basic information about their current enrolled benefits, dependents and beneficiaries, vendor/provider information and administrator contacts. Apart from what PeopleSoft delivers, you can configure additional utterances for the chatbot based on your company’s requirements.
The Benefits Assistant is available for all Benefits users as a tile and/or as a widget at the lower right-hand corner of fluid Benefits pages. Click the tile or widget to open a chat window. The employee may begin interacting with the chatbot via a simple greeting, or start directly with a question in a conversational way. This feature is available for both desktop and mobile users.
With the Benefits Assistant tile, Benefits users can access the Benefits Assistant for quick answers to queries related to benefits using Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA), the Oracle chatbot technology platform. ODA allows enterprises to create and deploy digital assistants for their users. With ODA, you create:
Digital Assistants, which are artificial intelligence (AI)-driven interfaces that help users accomplish a variety of tasks in natural language conversations. For each digital assistant, you assemble one or more skills.
Skills, which are individual bots that are focused on specific types of tasks, such as changing your dependants/beneficiaries, tracking inventory, submitting time cards, and creating expense reports.
You can add skills to digital assistants or deploy them to a channel on their own. Intents allow your skill to understand what the user wants it to do. An intent categorizes typical user requests by the tasks and actions that your skill performs.
For details, refer to Oracle Digital Assistants and Skills.
For Benefits Assistant, the Benefits Assistant skill consists of the following intents:
EntryGreeting
GetAdminContactInfo
GetDependentBeneficiary
GetLifeEventInfo
GetMainMenu
GetOpenEnrollmentInfo
GetPlanCost
GetPlanDetail
GetPlanProvider
UpdateBenefitSummary
ExitAssistant
unresolvedIntent
The entities associated with each intent are defined within the skill.
Entities |
Associated Intents |
---|---|
LIFEEVENT_TYPE |
GetLifeEventInfo |
PLAN_CATEGORY |
GetDependentBeneficiary |
GetPlanCost |
|
GetPlanProvider |
|
GetPlanDetail |
|
PLANTYPE |
GetDependentBeneficiary |
GetPlanCost |
|
GetPlanProvider |
|
GetPlanDetail |
|
UpdateBenefitSummary |
|
SUMM_UPD_FLAG SUMM_UPD_ACTION |
UpdateBenefitSummary |
These services can be used to call relevant application functionality as part of a query. The Chatbot Integration Framework delivers some services that can be used to help the chatbot carry out various tasks that these services allow to perform. To integrate the chatbot with the application services, you need to create a proxy user. This proxy user is used for the chatbot to communicate with the application services.
The dialog flow definition is the model for the conversation itself, one that lets you choreograph the interaction between a skill and its users.
The Services used in Benefits Assistant are:
HCM.benefit.Services
HCM.benefit.GetChildNode
If users need to create new service, then they can use the Application Service Framework to create custom services.
For more information please refer the documentation on Application Service Framework https://support.oracle.com/epmos/faces/DocumentDisplay?id=2557046.1
For details, refer Configure a Component Service
Understanding Application Service for Chatbot Integration Framework
PeopleSoft Employee Digital Assistant
PeopleSoft Intelligent Chatbot ASsistant from Oracle (PeopleSoft PICASO) is a consolidated, single-point access chatbot where your employees can ask questions spanning multiple PeopleSoft applications like Absence, Benefits, Employee Directory, Expenses, North American Payroll, and more. For information on PeopleSoft PICASO, see Understanding PeopleSoft PICASO.
The Benefits Assistant helps employees with their queries on benefits-related information such as their plan details, plan costs, administrator contacts, provider/vendor contacts, life events and open enrollment dates.
Note: The Benefits Assistant provides answers for queries related to Open Enrollment only for organizations with the PeopleSoft Benefits Administration.
The Benefit Details Navigation Collection users can access the Benefits Assistant as a widget. The Benefit Details Tile dashboard users get the tile system delivered on the Benefit Details Tile dashboard and as a widget on all the fluid Benefits pages.
Note: The roles and permission lists are part of the standard PeopleTools security administration, used to grant access to components and pages. The roles and permission lists are discussed in detail in the PeopleTools: Security Administration documentation.
Examples of Use Cases |
Benefits component from which the chatbot retrieves information |
---|---|
|
Benefit Plan Detail |
|
Benefit Plan Category Benefit Plan Type |
|
Dependents/Beneficiaries |
|
Benefit Vendor Information |
|
Administrator Contacts |