Cloud and container technologies promise to usher in a Golden Age of application development. The hurdle for app makers is getting consumers with terminal app fatigue to download yet another one.

“Frankly, there’s just too many apps,” said Sri Ramanathan (pictured), group vice president of mobile cloud at Oracle Corp. He explained that PC and mobile users are becoming reluctant to download yet another app they will rarely, if ever, use.

Speaking to John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE’s Palo Alto, CA, studio, Ramanathan used his daughter as an example: She likes eight stores in the mall, but there is no way she is downloading eight apps. She basically lives through four apps, Facebook and Snapchat among them. If those stores want her attention, they will have to reach her through those channels.

“That’s where I think a smart bot would make a huge amount of sense,” he said.

Oracle offers a special development platform “so you’re now able to expose your enterprise data and services not just to web apps and to mobile apps, but also to bots,” Ramanathan said.

Oracle makes it simple to add a bot in addition to web and mobile apps, because it the same API and integration stack in the back end. The bot can be deployed seamlessly on whatever channels a company chooses, he explained.

Chatbot 2.0 with AI

Chatbots have rightly been criticized in the past for providing a very sparse alternative to the full application experience, Ramanathan states.

“That’s where a good amount of work is going in,” he said. “How I can elevate the experience, make it fantastic, but at the same time take all the capabilities that are in all of these apps and [surface] them through the bot channels, whether it’s a voice channel or a messaging channel?”

AI and deep learning are baked into Oracle’s bot platform, so developers do not need personal expertise in those technologies, he added.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBEConversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE