Oracle Releases Oracle Voice for Sales Cloud

Oracle yesterday released Version 9 of the Oracle Sales Cloud, which contains a unique voice offering developed with Nuance Communications. Oracle Voice, officially named Oracle Fusion Voice Cloud Service for the Oracle Sales Cloud, is a speech-enabled virtual assistant that lets sales reps speak directly to the Oracle Sales Cloud on their smartphones.

Oracle Voice lets sales reps view their work so they walk into meetings prepared. Walking out of meetings, they can create Notes, Activities, and Contacts, and update Opportunities while the information is still fresh in their minds.

Instead of relying on slow typing on smartphones, sales reps can enter information three times faster by speaking to the Oracle Sales Cloud through Oracle Voice. The application leverages Nuance's automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech conversion.

Oracle Voice allows users to switch between voice, touch, and typing as needed. Users don't need any training to navigate and interact with Oracle Voice; they can simply tap and speak to enter a command. Oracle Voice takes them through a natural, conversational dialog to help them view or capture sales data in real time.

Oracle Voice is currently only available in North America with support for U.S. English.

"Oracle's own sales organization was involved in developing Oracle Voice for the Oracle Sales Cloud. We wanted to be sure that the user experience is seamless, works well on mobile devices, and is easy for all sales reps to use," said Kate Fitzgerald, group vice president of Oracle Sales Automation, in a statement.

"Busy sales people on the go need to very quickly and effectively interact with their enterprise systems. With Oracle's enterprise experience, and Nuance's natural language processing, we have made it as simple as using their voice," said Jeremy Ashley, vice president of Oracle Applications User Experience, in a statement.

"Mobile smart phones and tablets are quickly becoming the leading devices for interacting with enterprise applications, and Oracle has led the way through our broad set of mobile apps. Working with Nuance, we are also leading the way in using speech interfaces to make it easier and more natural to interact with enterprise solutions," said Alan Fothergill, vice president of Oracle Applications Development, in a statement.

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