Integrating APEX with OCI AI Services
Description
Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started!
Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.
Nikita: Hi everyone! Last week, we looked at how generative AI powers Oracle APEX and in today’s episode, we’re going to focus on integrating APEX with OCI AI Services.
Lois: That’s right, Niki. We’re going to look at how you can use Oracle AI services like OCI Vision, Oracle Digital Assistant, Document Understanding, OCI Generative AI, and more to enhance your APEX apps.
Nikita: And to help us with it all, we’ve got three amazing experts with us, Chaitanya Koratamaddi, Director of Product Management at Oracle, and senior product managers, Apoorva Srinivas and Toufiq Mohammed. In today’s episode, we’ll go through each Oracle AI service and look at how it interacts with APEX. Apoorva, let’s start with you. Can you explain what the OCI Vision service is?
Apoorva: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Vision is a serverless multi-tenant service accessible using the console or REST APIs. You can upload images to detect and classify objects in them. With prebuilt models available, developers can quickly build image recognition into their applications without machine learning expertise.
OCI Vision service provides a fully managed model infrastructure. With complete integration with OCI Data Labeling, you can build custom models easily. OCI Vision service provides pretrained models-- Image Classification, Object Detection, Face Detection, and Text Recognition. You can build custom models for Image Classification and Object Detection.
Lois: Ok. What about its use cases? How can OCI Vision make APEX apps more powerful?
Apoorva: Using OCI Vision, you can make images and videos discoverable and searchable in your APEX app.
You can use OCI Vision to detect and classify objects in the images. OCI Vision also highlights the objects using a red rectangular box. This comes in handy in use cases such as detecting vehicles that have violated the rules in traffic images.
You can use OCI Vision to identify visual anomalies in your data. This is a very popular use case where you can detect anomalies in cancer X-ray images to detect cancer. These are some of the most popular use cases of using OCI Vision with your APEX app. But the possibilities are endless and you can use OCI Vision for any of your image analysis.
Nikita: Let’s shift gears to Oracle Digital Assistant. Chaitanya, can you tell us what it’s all about?
Chaitanya: Oracle Digital Assistant is a low-code conversational AI platform that allows businesses to build and deploy AI assistants. It provides natural language understanding, automatic speech recognition, and text-to-speech capabilities to enable human-like interactions with customers and employees. Oracle Digital Assistant comes with prebuilt templates for you to get started.
Lois: What are its key features and benefits, Chaitanya? How does it enhance the user experience?
Chaitanya: Oracle Digital Assistant provides conversational AI capabilities that include generative AI features, natural language understanding and ML, AI-powered voice, and analytics and insights.
Integration with enterprise applications become easier with unified conversational experience, prebuilt chatbots for Oracle Cloud applications, and chatbot architecture frameworks. Oracle Digital Assistant provides advanced conversational design tools, conversational designer, dialogue and domain trainer, and native multilingual support. Oracle Digital Assistant is open, scalable, and secure. It provides multi-channel support, automated bot-to-agent transfer, and integrated authentication profile.
Nikita: And what about the architecture? What happens at the back end?
Chaitanya: Developers assemble digital assistants from one or more skills. Skills can be based on prebuilt skills provided by Oracle or third parties, custom developed, or based on one of the many skill templates available.
Lois: Chaitanya, what exactly are “skills” within the Oracle Digital Assistant framework?
Chaitanya: Skills are individual chatbots that are designed to interact with users and fulfill specific type of tasks. Each skill helps a user complete a task through a combination of text messages and simple UI elements like select list.
When a user request is submitted through a channel, the Digital Assistant routes the user's request to the most appropriate skill to satisfy the user's request.
Skills can combine multilingual NLP deep learning engine, a powerful dialogflow engine, and integration components to connect to back-end systems.
Skills provide a modular way to build your chatbot functionality. Now users connect with a chatbot through channels such as Facebook, Microsoft Teams, or in our case, Oracle APEX chatbot, which is embedded into an APEX application.
Nikita: That’s fascinating. So, what are some use cases of Oracle Digital Assistant in APEX apps?
Chaitanya: Digital assistants streamline approval processes by collecting information, routing requests, and providing status updates.
Digital assistants offer instant access to information and documentation, answering common questions and guiding users. Digital assistants assist sales teams by automating tasks, responding to inquiries, and guiding prospects through the sales funnel. Digital assistants facilitate procurement by managing orders, tracking deliveries, and handling supplier communication. Digital assistants simplify expense approvals by collecting reports, validating receipts, and routing them for managerial approval. Digital assistants manage inventory by tracking stock levels, reordering supplies, and providing real-time inventory updates. Digital assistants have become a common UX feature in any enterprise application.
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Nikita: Welcome back! Thanks for that, Chaitanya. Toufiq, let’s talk about the OCI Document Understanding service. What is it?
Toufiq: Using this service, you can upload documents to extract text, tables, and other key data. This means the service can automatically identify and extract relevant information from various types of documents, such as invoices, receipts, contracts, etc. The service is serverless and multitenant, which means you don't need to manage any servers or infrastructure. You can access this service using the console, REST APIs, SDK, or CLI, giving you multiple ways to integrate.
Nikita: What do we use for APEX apps?
Toufiq: For APEX applications, we will be using REST APIs to integrate the service. Additionally, you can process individual files or batches of documents using the ProcessorJob API endpoint. This flexibility allows you to handle different volumes of documents efficiently, whether you need to process a single document or thousands at once. With these capabilities, the OCI Document Understanding service can significantly streamline your document processing tasks, saving time and reducing the potential for manual errors.
Lois: Ok. What are the different types of models available? How do they cater to various business needs?
Toufiq: Let us start with pre-trained models. These are ready-to-use models that come right out of the box, off
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