Slack announced a partnership with Oracle on Tuesday that will allow its joint customers to easily add Oracle Intelligent Bots to its messaging platform.
The suite of bots, available through the Oracle Intelligent Bot Platform, connects Slack with Oracle applications like Oracle ERP cloud and HCM cloud out of the box.
The intelligent chatbots use deep learning-based natural language understanding to understand end-user conversations, helping companies process conversations, integrate with existing business application data, and automatically respond. The notification-only version of the bots is available now.
Oracle has 30,000 active users of Slack, and the partnership is the latest enterprise-focused team-up from Slack, aimed at helping its enterprise users make better use of its messaging platform. Partnerships, along with its recent funding, help its larger, more conservative customers see that Slack has staying power, CEO Stewart Butterfield said recently.
The new chatbot features come as part of an update announced this week to Oracle Mobile Cloud, including the launch of the Oracle Bot Builder, which allows users to “configure these bots for their company’s unique workflows, building upon their existing functionality.” The low-code builder allows developers to test and deploy bots, and access analytics for bot adoption and usage.
The intelligent chatbots can be used with other messaging platforms as well, including Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, and digital voice assistants such as Amazon Echo, Amazon Dot and Google Home. The bots also provide native and JavaScript SDK to extend mobile and web-based applications with chat and voice capabilities via Apple Siri, GoogleVoice or Microsoft Cortana, according to Oracle.
Slack users can expect more interactive bots ready for use with Oracle Intelligent Bots in the coming months.
In addition to adding new language support recently, Slack added EMM integration in August. Expect the enterprise additions to Slack to keep coming as the company heads toward a possible IPO in 2019.
