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What’s New for Oracle Digital Assistant

Here’s an overview of recently-added features and enhancements in Oracle Digital Assistant.

Topics:

October, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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You can now create groups of skills within a digital assistant to improve intent resolution for skills that are in the same domain. This was added as a patch to the 20.08 release. Skill Groups
The Native Client SDK for Web was updated to version 20.8.2. In prior releases, the SDK sent the messages initiated by the initUserHiddenMessage and initUserProfile properties when the client connected to the skill for the first time. It didn't matter whether the chat widget was opened or closed. Consequently, these messages counted towards billing and increased the number of incomplete conversations logged by Insights. Starting with this release, these messages are only sent after the client has connected to the skill and the chat widget is expanded. If you still want to send the message whenever the client has connected to the skill, with no regards to display state of chat widget, you can use the new property, initMessageOptions. If you opt for this behavior, billing starts when the init message has been sent, even if the widget is still closed. Web SDK Functionality

August, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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Starting with this release, each skill and digital assistant is tied to a specific platform version that corresponds to a release. This means that the behavior of your bots doesn’t change when your Digital Assistant instance is upgraded. You can upgrade your bots to pick up enhancements from new platform versions when it best suits you. Each platform version remains valid for 18 months. Platform Version
You can now create multi-language digital assistants, based on a translation service. For output messages, you can either use the translation service or resource bundles. Localization of Digital Assistants
If you have a Oracle Digital Assistant instance that is paired with a Fusion-based Oracle Applications Cloud service, such as HCM Cloud or Sales Cloud, you can now link that instance with a Digital Assistant instance that you have as an individual service. This enables you to create custom skills and digital assistants directly within your paired instance. Linking Instances
You can now create authentication services of grant type authorization code for Google Identity Platform and Microsoft Identity Platform, in addition to OAM and IDCS. Add an Authorization Code Service
Your skills can now integrate with an Oracle Service Cloud Knowledge Foundation service to search for and display articles from its knowledge base. In addition, the Automated Agent Assistant sample from the skill store now includes examples of how to use this feature. Use the System.KnowledgeSearch Component
You can now change the DA as Agent channel routing without having to disable the channel. Change DA as Agent Channel Configuration
You can compare two or more versions of a skill to find out how changes to the skill or the platform may have affected the skill's ability to complete conversations. Compare Metrics Across Different Versions of Skills
You can now apply a Confidence Threshold to a batch test to approximate real-world intent resolution. Batch Test Intents
The Skill Tester now has voice support for the client SDKs (Oracle Web, Oracle Android, and Oracle iOS). The Skill Tester
Skill Insights now tracks voice conversations side-by-side with text conversations. Voice conversations are measured by both voice-specific metrics and the metrics common to both voice and text, such as completed or incomplete conversation counts. Insights
The client SDKs (Oracle Web, Oracle Android, and Oracle iOS) have been enhanced through the addition of a voice visualizer in the testing widget that indicates the audio level, an icon for live agents, and a dynamic typing indicator that displays after each skill response. Oracle Digital Assistant SDK Downloads
There is a new API to export a digital assistant's or skill's insights data. Insights Export in REST API for Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
You can now have our Ops team set up a backup Digital Assistant instance in a designated region. This will serve as a hot spare for the primary instance with metadata replication. Heartbeat checks will monitor the health of the message delivery in primary instance and automated failover will kick in within a few minutes if necessary.  
It is now possible for bot users to retrieve attachments that are included in conversations in the Slack and Microsoft Teams channels. To enable this, the URL in the attachment message payload now points to a Digital Assistant attachment server rather than to Microsoft or Slack server.  

June, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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In addition to being able extend skills, you can now extend any digital assistant that you pull from the Skill Store and then later rebase that digital assistant to take advantage of updates to the original. Extending Digital Assistants and Skills
You can now record and use test cases for digital assistants. If you pull a digital assistant from the Skill Store and that digital assistant comes with test cases, you can run these test cases against extended versions of this digital assistant to ensure that your modifications have not broken any of the digital assistant's basic functions. Test Cases
Creation of Slack channels is now based on an updated OAuth flow in Slack apps that enables more granular scopes. Slack Channels
Oracle Service Cloud supports embedded chat inlay for versions 20A and later. If the chat client for your DA-as-agent digital assistant is the embedded chat inlay instead of the default chat that's accessed through the customer portal, then the common response component of type card will display items as cards, and actions will display as buttons. With the the default chat, these are displayed as text only. How UI Components Display in Oracle Service Cloud Chat
Version 20.6.1 of the Oracle Native Web SDK has been released. This release provides improvements for browser storage management and the validation of messages that are returned by delegate callback handlers. In addition to these improvements, the fixes in this version of the SDK address reflected XXS attacks and correct the prior release's problems with the voice authentication process in client auth-enabled mode. Oracle Digital Assistant SDK Downloads
The CURRENCY, NUMBER, DATE, and TIME entities have been improved to better handle the context in which they are uttered. For example, in the phrase "transfer 500 USD", "500 USD" will be matched to the CURRENCY entity, but "500" will not be matched to NUMBER.  
The UI framework of Digital Assistant has been upgraded to Oracle JET version 8.2. The result is some performance improvements and some minor changes in the UI. Most notably, the button for the bot tester has moved from the left navigation for skills and digital assistants to the top of the page.  

May, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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Version 20.5.1 of the Oracle SDKs for Web, iOS, and Android have all been released. These updates include support for the Redwood Dark theme, support for the French (fr-fr) and Spanish (es-es) locales, accessibility improvements, and many other enhancements and fixes. Oracle Digital Assistant SDK Downloads

April, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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Trainer Tm has been enhanced. Among other capabilities, Tm can now automatically recognize out-of-domain phrases and can distinguish between the relevant and irrelevant content in a phrases, even when the irrelevant content can be resolved to an intent. If you want to use the improved Trainer Tm in existing skills, you need to retrain them. Note that the confidence levels for your intents may change when you start using the new Tm. Trainer Tm
You can now store IDCS user profile data for authenticated users for the duration of a skill's conversation. To store the data, set the System.OAuth2AccountLink's updateUserProfile property to true. Store IDCS User Profile for the Duration of the Session
When extending skills that you have pulled from the Skill Store, you can now disable any intents that you don't want to use. Disabling Intents
Now you can track the number of multi-turn conversations being carried out by the skills registered to your digital assistant. In Progress Conversations Monitored at the Digital Assistant Level
You can now configure the System.AgentTransfer component to transfer to an agent even if all agents have reached their maximum number of chats. You can also request a transfer even if no agents have requested a chat or all agents have reached their maximum. Configure When to Attempt Agent Transfer

March, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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You can now set up skills to initiate conversations with users on the Microsoft Teams and Slack messaging platforms. (This feature was already available for Twilio.) Application-Initiated Conversations
There are new properties that you can use in your dialog flows to focus the Insights reporting to just the parts of conversation that you're interested in. Conversation Markers
Skill Insights now counts "in-flight" conversations, so that you can keep track of multi-turn conversations. In Progress Conversation Count
In Insights, there's now a Most Popular Intents word cloud report that weighs intent usage and resolution by size and color. You can see key phrases that represent user messages resolved to any intent that you select in the cloud and you can apply the actual messages to the Retrainer. Most Popular Intents Word Cloud
The Oracle SDKs for Web, iOS, and Android have all been updated. Oracle Digital Assistant SDK Downloads
Administrators can now access logs of user activity in Oracle Digital Assistant directly from the Oracle Digital Assistant user interface. Audit Trail

February, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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The Oracle Native Client SDKs for iOS and Android are now available to help you create channels for iOS and Android devices.

These SDKs include support for:

  • Voice Recognition: Allows users to converse with skills using their voice.

  • Text to Speech: Supports audio narration of the messages received from skills.

  • Attachment: Supports uploading attachments to the server and sending them to the skill. It also supports rendering of the attachment messages received from the skill.

  • Location: Enables users to share their location to the skill when prompted.

  • Headless SDK: The SDK can be used without a UI. The SDK maintains the connection to server and provides APIs to send messages, receive messages, get updates to network status and other functionalities.

  • Client Authentication: Supports connections with client authentication enabled or disabled.

The Web SDK has been updated. New features include:
  • Cordova Sample: Can be used to build iOS and Android apps.
  • typingIndicatorTimeout: Allows you to configure the duration in seconds after which the typing indicator should be removed.
  • i18n.<locale>.chatSubtitle: Allows you to set a subtitle in the chat widget header right below the title.
  • showPrevConvStatus: Determines whether the status message that is located at the end of older messages from previous conversations is displayed or not.
  • getConversationHistory(): Returns an object containing conversation information for the current user.
  • isConnected(): Returns true if the SDK is connected to server, and false if it is not.
  • setUserInputMessage(message): Enables setting or updating the user input TextArea with a message without sending it to the skill or digital assistant. It can be utilized to pre-populate the input with a recommended message.
  • setUserInputPlaceholder(text): Enables updating of the input TextArea placeholder dynamically with passed text. It can be utilized to update placeholder text according to the type of input expected from the user.
  • setAllMessagesAsRead(): Can be called to mark all messages as having been read by the user.
In addition, the following improvements have been made:
  • Voice Buffer: The buffer size for voice data has been fine-tuned to provide full voice recognition support on Safari.
  • Single Reconnection: The SDK now maintains only a single WebSocket connection to the server during reconnection attempts.
  • String Translations: The translation service has been updated to give higher preference to the locale configured during initialization over the user’s browser locales. The configured locale is applied to the SDK if the translations are available for it. The updated preference order is:
  1. Configured locale in initialization, e.g. locale: 'fr-fr'
  2. Browser locales: navigator.languages
  3. Default: 'en'
 Web Channel

January, 2020 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

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When you register a skill that's configured to autocomplete user input to a digital assistant, the autocomplete capability for that skill is then surfaced in the digital assistant-level response message. Autocomplete in the Web Channel
If your skill uses translation services, the Retrainer displays user messages in the target language, but adds English languages versions of them to the training data. Multilingual Support in the Insights Retrainer
Agent Transfer has a new object structure for passing custom field values to Oracle Service Cloud. Skills that are associated with existing channels can use the prior (legacy) structure. Skills that are associated with newly created channels must use the new structure. Passing Customer Information to a Live Chat
When you transfer a skill's chat to an Oracle Service Cloud agent, the user can now attach images during the conversation with the agent. Enable Attachments

December, 2019 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

Starting with this release, all new orders of Oracle Digital Assistant are provisionable on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (Gen 2).

All features that were previously available only in Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Platform (Gen 1) are now available in this release.

Feature Find out more ...
Within Oracle Digital Assistant instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can now create a digital assistant and embed it as an agent with Oracle Service Cloud. DA as an Oracle Service Cloud Agent
There are new Insights reports tailored to digital assistants that are exposed through Oracle Service Cloud. Insights for DA as an Oracle Service Cloud Agent
You can now let users interact with digital assistants through speech. Voice Channels
There is a new and enhanced SDK for the Web channel. Web SDK
You can now define a specific answer for a skill to give when it detects a given intent. Answer Intents
You can now record conversations in the Skill Tester and use the saved conversations as test cases. Then, for skills from the Skill Store that you have extended, you can run these test cases to ensure that your modifications have not broken any of the skill's basic functions. Skill Test Cases
Custom component packages that you upload to an embedded custom component service must now contain all node module dependencies. If there are missing node dependencies, you will see this error:
Error Message: failed to start service built: Invalid component
      path

If you export a skill from a previous version, and the skill uses embedded custom components, you will most likely get an error when you use the skill because the component service's package doesn't contain the dependencies. You will have to download the service's TGZ file, add the node module dependencies, and re-upload.

 Prepare the Package for an Embedded Container Service

Oracle Digital Assistant now limits the number of custom component services per instance. You won't be able to do any of the following once you have the maximum of custom component services:

  • Add a custom component service.
  • Version or clone a skill that has a custom component service.
  • Import a skill that has a custom component service.

If any of these actions fails due to exceeding the limit, you won't see the reason for the failure. To see the component service limit, go to the service limits page in the Infrastructure Console. If you need to raise the limit, you can request an increase.

 Configure a Service for the Embedded Container
You can track the performance of one or more states in the Path Insights report to find out how many conversations successfully flowed through them, or how many conversations were ended with them. For the states where the conversation ended prematurely, you can expand the path to find the cause. Review Paths Insights

October, 2019 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Platform)

This release features increased integration with Oracle Service Cloud.

Feature Find out more ...
You can now create a digital assistant and embed it as an agent with Oracle Service Cloud. DA as an Oracle Service Cloud Agent
There are new Insights reports tailored to digital assistants that are exposed through Oracle Service Cloud. Insights for Oracle Service Cloud Agent
The Conversation Designer now highlights entities and keywords, so you can easily identify the values that get replaced by user input at runtime. The Conversation Designer
You can now define a specific answer for a skill to give when it detects a given intent. Answer Intents
You can track the performance of one or more states in the Path Insights report to find out how many conversations successfully flowed through them, or how many conversations were ended with them. For the states where the conversation ended prematurely, you can expand the path to find the cause. Review Path Insights
Custom component packages that you upload to an embedded custom component service must now contain all node module dependencies. If there are missing node dependencies, you will see this error:
Error Message: failed to start service built: Invalid component
      path

If you export a skill from a previous version, and the skill uses embedded custom components, you will most likely get an error when you use the skill because the component service's package doesn't contain the dependencies. You will have to download the service's TGZ file, add the node module dependencies, and re-upload.

 Prepare the Package for an Embedded Container Service

October, 2019 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure)

This is the first release of Oracle Digital Assistant as an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service. This release contains features particularly geared toward customers of Oracle Cloud Application services who want to customize skills that are provided by those services.

Feature Find out more ...
You can now extend skills that you pull from the Skill Store and then later rebase those skills to take advantage of updates to the base skill. Extending Skills
You can now create entity lists that can be updated dynamically with REST API calls. Create Dynamic Entities
An improved SDK is available for the web channel. Oracle Web SDK
The Conversation Designer now highlights entities and keywords, so you can easily identify the values that get replaced by user input at runtime. The Conversation Designer
The skill and digital assistant tester simulates the rendering on your preferred channel and alerts you to any limitations on that channel. Test Rendering for a Channel
You can now specify specific states in a digital assistant to handle user input that is resolved as the help intent and for input where the intent is unresolved. Specify States for the help and unresolvedIntent System Intents
The System.OAuth2Client authentication component has been introduced to support the OAuth Client Credentials grant type. System.OAuth2Client
The built-in PERSON entity has been enhanced to handle international names and incorrect capitalization. In addition, it can be extracted based on the context. Complex Entities
There is now a built-in LOCATION entity that is based on machine learning. Complex Entities
You can incorporate Microsoft Teams components such as adaptive cards in skills that you deploy through a Microsoft Teams channel. Adaptive Cards

June, 2019 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Platform)

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It was already possible to create skills in non-English languages. Now you can create digital assistants that provide welcome, help, and disambiguation messages in non-English languages as well. Non-English Digital Assistants
You can now host your webview apps on an external web app server, or within Oracle Digital Assistant itself. If you let Oracle Digital Assistant host your app, you don't even need a web server. You just need to bundle your app as TGZ file and upload it. Hosted Webview
Try out the Conversation Designer (in beta for this release) to quickly build a skill without having to define any intents, entities, or write a even a single line of OBotML. Instead, you focus on the user experience--the typical user requests and bot responses that complete your use case. The Conversation Designer
Within a skill, it is now possible to add calls to different skills. For example, you can use this to explicitly enable a user of a shopping skill to jump to a banking skill to check their bank balance before returning to the shopping skill to complete an order. Call a Skill from Another Skill
You can now configure a skill to include an incident ID when transferring a chat to a live agent through Oracle Service Cloud. The incidentID Property
After an agent ends a chat session in an agent-integrated skill, you might want to ask the customer to complete a survey. Oracle Digital Assistant now makes the Oracle Service Cloud survey ID available from the skill. Get Survey Information
You can now enable the agent to specify which state to transition to after the live-chat session ends. Enable Agents to Specify the Transition Action
In your dialog flows, you can take advantage of features that are specific to individual messaging platforms, such as Facebook and Slack. Channel-Specific Extensions

February, 2019 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Platform)

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We already provide reports that give you different perspectives on our insights data, but now you can use the new export feature to create your own reports, based on your own requirements. Export Insights Data
We've added support to show top-level ODA routing analytics (like explicit vs implicit, for example) and popular skills by invocation. Use this data to determine how well the ODA is routing requests to its constituent skills so you can optimize ODA routing, identify popular skills, and so on. Evaluate Usage Patterns
Our new Analytics reports let you see overall trends in how your skills complete conversations and the volume of conversations for each channel. You can also see how much time customers spend with each skill, as well as how much time they spend with a live agent, or customer service rep (CSR). Skill Analytics
Want to keep track of how much storage your insights data is consuming, so you can purge it from the database to free up space? Our new Data Management tool lets you do just that. Data Management
We've added a new map variable type and a new property to our human agent support framework that enables you to route the user to a specific agent queue in Oracle Service Cloud. Oracle Service Cloud Routing
The new Interrupt Flow Confidence Threshold helps you determine when to send the user a prompt to confirm that they want to switch flows, and when to send a message notifying them that they have switched flows. Limit the Frequency of Prompts
Need to support your user's chats on more channels? We've added channels for Slack, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Cortana with this release. Channels
The new System.OAuth2ResetTokens component enables you to revoke all the logged-in users' refresh and access tokens from a dialog flow. To use this component, you must first provide the identity provider's revoke refresh token URL when you configure the authentication service. System.OAuth2ResetTokens and Authentication Services
You may sometimes find that the authorization URL generated by the OAuth2AccountLink component (used for the 3-legged OAuth flow) is too large. To address this, you can now use a predefined short URL for the fixed fields, and let the state be populated dynamically. OAuth2AccountLink

November, 2018 (Oracle Digital Assistant on Oracle Cloud Platform)

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Now you can create your own digital assistant, a “master bot” that fields requests from multiple skills (chatbots), while interacting with your customers within the context of a single, unified UI. What are Digital Assistants?
Need developer-oriented analytics to pinpoint issues with your skills so you can address them before they cause problems? We’ve got them! Track conversation trends over time, identify execution paths, determine the accuracy of your intent resolutions, and much, much more. Insights
Sometimes it’s not enough to have the customer initiate all the conversations with your skills. You may want your ODA to initiate a conversation with your user whenever it receives a triggering event from another app—like when a user’s expense report is rejected, for example. Use our Application-Initiated-Conversations (AIC) to set up the behavior you want.> Application-Initiated Conversations
This release introduces lots of new features for instant apps, including localization, bring-your-own CSS support, new styling and an updated look and feel, and more. Instant Apps
Thanks to our new System.OAuth2AccountLink component, which completes all the steps for the three-legged OAuth2 flow and returns the OAuth2 access token, your custom component no longer has to exchange an authorization code for an access token. Faster and easier! System.OAuth2AccountLink
You could always define custom parameters to be referenced from dialog flows. But now you can define parameters that start with “da” and use them by all the skills that are registered in the same digital assistant. Custom Parameters
Properties of the System.Intent component, like confidenceLevel and winMargin, are now configured as settings through the UI, instead of from the dialog flow. Much more convenient! Tune Intent Resolution Before Publishing
Entities have a whole set of exciting new features, including pagination (to control the number of values that display in a message), fuzzy matching, multiple value selection (where users can pick more than one value), and more!

There’s a lot going on in the composite bag world as well. Composite bag entities can now include non-entity members, for starters. Check out the documentation to find out more!

 Entities
ODA now lets you define your intents and custom entities in both English and Simplified Chinese, without having to first configure an auto-translation service. N/A