Whats New in Oracle Intelligent Advisor 20A?

The crop of new features in 20A this month can also be filled out with some extra new features that crept into 19D when it was updated about a month after the initial release.

In 20A, the focus is very much on enhancing the connection with Oracle Engagement Cloud. As those who work with it know, up until now getting set up with an Intelligent Advisor interview has required Groovy Script. More importantly, Oracle Engagement Cloud / Oracle Intelligent Advisor integration has lagged behind the others (notably the Oracle Service Cloud, or even Oracle Siebel integrations) in terms of functionality. And finally, in the past it was absolutely awful in performance terms, notably the GetMetaData was renowned, at least where I was working, for taking up to 4 minutes to provide a response.

The performance issues were worked on a while ago, and Oracle have made great strides in that direction, so now it is fantastic to see that the other aspects of the connector are getting some love too:

Dynamic reference data loading – the ability to load in additional data from Engagement Cloud (for example, product catalog or transaction history information) after the user is already part way through an advice experience, Yup, ExecuteQuery comes to Engagement Cloud integrations.

Native Intelligent Advisor control in Application Composer – adding an Intelligent Advisor interview into a subtab of an agent workspace no longer requires groovy script. Essentially a “plug and play” drop-in component for your Oracle Engagement Cloud subtab.  You can read more about it here.

Connector support for the Case object – Given the broad reach of Oracle Intelligent Advisor (benefits, law enforcement and so on) in the Public Sector and other “case focused” industry use cases, Case records can now be loaded, updated and created directly from Intelligent Advisor interviews. This includes support for  child objects of case (contact, household, message, resource and custom child) within the same interview. For further details, you can click here.

As a final, fun bonus – this time not related to Oracle Engagement Cloud – Image Control Extensions come to JavaScript! Very cool, since I have a friend and customer who has been waiting for this for a long time. Thanks to Oracle Intelligent Advisor Development for delivering it. We’ll be showing an example in the coming days. You get stuff like this:

• getImageSource() – Returns the URL of the image to be displayed
• getLinkUrl() – (Optional) Returns the URL of the link the user should be navigated to when they click on the image
• openLinkInNewWindow() – Returns true if the image’s link URL should be opened in a new window
• getHorizontalAlignment() – Specifies the horizontal alignment of the control
• getWidth() – Returns the width of the control in pixels
• getHeight() – Returns the height of the control in pixels
• getCaption() – Returns the image description (alternate text)

If you want to learn about Control Extensions, you can read the book.

There are a few other enhancements, notably a versioned authentication in REST. But the OIA team have once again moved the bar higher and I think they deserve a big round of applause.