SAP Chatbot – Talk to SAP Applications with Google Home/Facebook Messenger/Skype

Here is one proof of concept on how human can interact with SAP applications with natural language! There are several AI/NLP platforms available, but I found the most robust and easiest platform is Google’s API.AI. API.ai is a standalone NLP framework which can be used to natural language-enable any application via APIs as well as to build own chatbots. API.AI makes it possible to receive and respond to user queries in natural language. So, whether you aim to answer questions or help users to be more productive, API.AI can help you build engaging experiences.

To build a Conversation Action with API.AI, start by defining the user requests or intents that your service will handle. Then design the conversational flow. If you’re new to API.AI and want to develop Conversation Actions, see handy docs and tutorials.

Once your agent is ready in API.AI platform, you can integrate your agent to SAP Cloud Platform via creating a Webhook. Webhook can be any application deployed in SAP Cloud Platform which accept requests in JASON format and respond back in JASON.

SAP Cloud Platform provides most powerful capabilities for connecting with SAP backend systems via SAP Cloud Connector.

In this PoC, I created a chatbot who helps a transportation settlement specialists in an organization. The backend systems involved here is SAP Transportation Management. The bot can answer the statuses of documents or it can send freight settlement documents from SAP TM to connected SAP ERP system – by just talking to the bot the same way we talk to our friends. The various components involved here are,

There are thousands of use cases we can think of with this by creating chat-bots and connection different sap application systems. The architecture shown above stays same for any type of bots. SAP Cloud Platform gives powerful ways to interact with an SAP system like never before.

With API.AI integration capabilities, you can easily create bots with facebook, skype and connect to the agent you created in api.ai.

Here is the facebook messenger integration example:

and the Skype integration example:

There is no limit for imagination… so start developing your SAP-Bots now….