B1 Assistant – Retire your keyboard with SAP Business One and Alexa

Update April 2020:

Thank you for your interest in the B1 Assistant. The original prototype has been modified a lot since its inception. The goal was to make it simpler to deploy so more and more partners could use it. The result, is the B1 Assistant Lite which can be deployed in minutes. It has a smaller functionality scope but completely serves its purpose: to enable you in how the integration works and how to work with Alexa. The whole deployment, together with a conceptual presentation can be found in the video below.

If you still want to deploy the first released version, please continue to the original below:

ORIGINAL POST – 10/10/2016

You’ve probably heard about a prototype we demo at the ASUG Summit in Miami. The proposal was to present how easy companies can embrace the digital economy transforming their business on daily tasks (if you haven’t seen that before, you are probably not following the right people on twitter).

A bit different from what some of you asked me, this is not a core feature of SAP Business One, it’s a prototype developed by the Solution Architects team, just like many others we shared before.

Good news the code is open for you to use and implement your own version. And here is a tutorial of how to install the B1 Assistant and “retire” your keyboard for some B1 tasks.

So, grab your popcorn, sit tight, follow me on twitter and enjoy this how-to!

The Architecture

Alexa  (Amazon Echo’s persona) has several capabilities (Skills). Those are divided between Native (time, weather, traffic, news…) or 3^rd Party (Uber, Spotify, Business One…)

To activate the 3^rd party skill, we use Invocation Names. Those are nothing more than the name of the skill we want to call. For example: “Alexa, ask Uber for a ride” or “Alexa, open Spotify”. Once it hears your command, it will identify the skill to be triggered and call a specific Web Service that can be hosted on a Private Cloud or on AWS. Like this:

In our case, working the with B1 Assistant Skill the architecture is:

It’s not my intention to get into details about skill. I strongly suggest you take a look at Alexa’s documentation. It’s highly informative

Skills details

Beside the Invocation Names, the skills have 2 other attributes, the intent, which is the specific action to be activated and the slots that works as parameters of the first one.

Implementing the B1 Assistant

Enough with definitions and small talk, let’s go for the funny part. So you can have your own B1 Assistant.

Prerequisites

• A SAP Business One on HANA 9.2 PL04 environment.
  • PL03 will also work, with limited features (No Prediction)
• SBODEMOUS schema
  • To work with different schema, please adapt all models and procedures
• An Amazon Developer account
  • To Create the Alexa Skill
• An Amazon Web Services Account
  • Also works with SAP Cloud Platform
  • Or on a local environment
• An Amazon Echo (not mandatory, but pretty cool to demo)

All the code used in this tutorial is shared on github

1 – Deploying the B1 Assistant HANA app

We’ve seen that whenever a user asks Alexa , it will trigger a Skill, this skill will call a function and this function will interact with an application (SAP Business One)

So let’s build our stack, starting by the end. The B1 Assistant App on HANA.

There 2 options for this part:

• You can import the b1Assistant application delivery unity into your HANA System
  • see how to import a delivery unity
• Or just clone the code directly from github and create your own XS project.

Whatever the case, once you have the b1Assistant package on your HANA system.
Go to HANA Administration Tools dashboard (http://hanaserver:8000/sap/hana/xs/admin) and set a user and password for the file: b1Assistant > lib > annonuser.xssqlcc

Note: Alexa will use this user to retrieve data and access the services.
You can also access http://hanaserver:8000/b1Assistant to test your app back-end

note: B1 user/pass is set on services/b1call.xsjs file

2 – Creating the B1 Assistant Skill

Create a new Alexa Skill following these steps. When asked for a Model choose Custom.

Next part we need to customize and build the skill.

On the Skill menu, choose the option JSON Editor. Replace its content with the model on our GitHub.

Click Save then Build your model

3 – Creating the B1 Assistant Function

With the HANA App deployed, we need a function to call its services (Create orders, item recommendation, sales info).

As mentioned before, we have a couple options to do this. Both demonstrated on this video

Option 1 – Using Amazon Web Service Lambda Functions

• Access your Amazon Web Services Account.
• Folllow the steps to Create an AWS Lambda function for Alexa
  • You can pick any Blueprint based on NodeJS
• Don’t forget to Add a Trigger
• Once the function is created you can replace its code with ours
• Set your HANA Server Host and Port where indicated

Option 2 – Run the app on SAP Cloud Platform – Cloud Foundry

• Get start with your Cloud Foundry environment on SCP or Log into your current environment
• Set your current folder to /skill/nodejs and run the commands to push the app to SCP

Sample output when the app is successfully deployed on SAP Cloud Platform

4 – Link the function to your Alexa Skill and Test.

Last step!

Whatever option you choose before, at the end you should have an enpoint for your function. I.e, an ARN if you are using Amazon Lambda, or an URL if you pushed the app to SAP Cloud Plaftorm.

Back to the Amazon Developer Console (the same as step 2). Choose the right the menu Endpoint and set the right option for your case.

Choose the type of Endpoint for you case and set the address. More about endpoints here

Save your settings and build your model again!

Your B1 Assistant is ready to work! You can use the Test Console, the Echo Simulator or with a real Amazon Echo by enabling the Skill on your Alexa app. Which is much cooler ?

Spit it out!

Do you like it? Or maybe you hate it? Have any questions? Feel free to ask and let your comments below. Your feedback it much appreciated.

Special Thanks to the SAP Business One dev team in Shanghai that helped us with the predictive analysis feature! You rock!

B1 Assisant got smarter!!

There is a very cool enchament on this prototype made by Yatsea Li, integrating it with the Twitter Sentiment App. If you want to give your B1 Assistant more powers, once you fisished this tutorial, follow the instructions in his blog