Fishbowl Solutions continues to highlight its focus on designing, developing, and supporting solutions for the Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) platform. Recently, Fishbowl’s ODA consultants Andy Weaver, Scott Wall, and Elliot Carson passed the Oracle Cloud Platform Digital Assistant Certified Associate exam. This exam has been available for less than a month, so we are pretty sure Fishbowl’s consultants represent the first candidates to pass the exam.

The exam itself is 72, multiple-choice questions. Candidates must obtain a score of 74% or above to pass, and those that do have “demonstrated the knowledge required to create and manage Conversational AI, Dialog flow and conversation Design.” I sat down with each of Fishbowl’s ODA certified associates to get their perspective on what prepared them to pass the test. Here is what they had to say. 

Andy Weaver – Senior Software Consultant and ODA Team Lead

Andy Weaver has been working with the ODA platform since its release in 2017. Since that time, Andy has worked on numerous customer implementations including one at this global, office supply retailer that is using the ODA on their public website for customer service. Andy’s skill and knowledge in integrating ODA with Oracle ServiceCloud was instrumental in this deployment. Andy used his ServiceCloud integration knowledge with ODA to also deliver a digital assistant at a large entertainment and hospitality company. This company wanted to provide a virtual assistant for every employee to ensure they stay engaged and can find information regarding schedules, pay, and company policies using their mobile phones. Andy said that it was a combination of working on such implementations, as well as seeing the platform evolve across two release cycles, including adding the channel integrations (Facebook, Slack, etc.), that prepared him to pass the exam. 

Scott Wall – Software Consultant

Scott has been working on the ODA platform for a little over one year, but he has already helped deliver a digital assistant for a daily newspaper company that wanted to scale up their customer service department without adding headcount. Scott’s familiarity with ODA’s capability to hand off to a live agent enabled him to integrate this customer’s digital assistant with Zendesk. Scott said learning about this agent hand off capability, as well as working with ODA’s conversational flow designer and specific skills like the ability to search knowledgebase articles, prepared him for the test.

Elliot Carson – Associate Software Consultant

Elliot has also been working on the ODA platform for about one year. Elliot worked with Scott on the newspaper company’s digital assistant (referenced above), and he has also been involved with creating some of Fishbowl’s ODA demos including one for customer service within a retail use case. As far as what prepared him to pass the test, he added that even though the ODA technical documentation provided a good study guide, his real-world experiences building and delivering digital assistants gave him the knowledge he needed to pass.

Andy Weaver ODA associate certificate.