Family Tree App with AI Agent and Natural Speech for IR

-

I showcased my family tree app during the ACE Master Series. There was some interest in this app, so I decided to upgrade this app to Oracle APEX 26.1 and enhance it to leverage 26.1 features like AI Agents and Natural Speech for IR.


Installation Instructions

You can download the packaged app here: download.

To install, just import the app in the APEX Builder. If you don't have an APEX environment, get yourself a free APEX workspace on apex.oracle.com. It only takes a few minutes and an e-mail address to get you started with Oracle APEX.

During the import, you will be asked to enter the credentials for OpenAI. These are only required when using the chatbot on the startpage or when using natural speech on the address book page. By default, the app will use gpt5.4-mini as LLM, but feel free to change this. If you have an API key for ChatGPT available, enter the key here in this way:

Client ID: Authorization
Client Secret: Bearer <OpenAI key>


If the credential already exists, you can skip this step. For those of you that want to use a different AI provider, just proceed without entering anything and change the AI provider after the installation. If you don't want to use the chatbot functionality, also proceed without entering the credentials. After installation, remove the button "Ask AI" on page 16 after installation and disable natural speech for the IR on page 12.


Tree and Network Charts

There are two nice charts in the app that show the tree data in two different styles, both accessible through the navigation menu, so try them out first.


Credits for the CSS that make this magic appearance go to Christian Rokitta who wrote about this in his blog a long time ago.


Credits for this excellent plugin go to Ottmar Gobrecht. You can find his plugin here: https://github.com/ogobrecht/d3-force-apex-plugin

Use natural speech when working with the address book

The address book page has Natural Speech for IR activated, so you can ask questions like "Set last name to de Bruijn" here.


Ask questions related to the family tree

After clicking on "Ask AI" on the startpage, you can start asking questions like "Who are the children of Niels?" or "How is 902 related to Niels?". After asking a question, the LLM gets a list of tools (PL/SQL functions) that it may request to be run to get an answer on the question. In the APEX Builder, have a look at the "AI Agents" section in "Shared Components" to see how this was implemented. I used AI to generate the PL/SQL package to provide basic functionality, but feel free to optimize and extend the code to suit your needs.

Have fun exploring the features of this app and let me know if you like the app.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Software Development Lifecycle with Oracle APEX

-
Image
The software development lifecycle (SDLC) with Oracle APEX can take many forms. This blog post will give you an overview of four common scenarios. If you are interested to learn the details, I recommend reading the following paper from the APEX team: https://apex.oracle.com/go/lifecycle-technical-paper Author Steve Muench, Version 3.2, June 2025 1. Single environment, single developer In a situation where a single developer works directly against the production environment, the lifecycle couldn’t be simpler. In this scenario, you typically would create a working copy of the app in APEX, make changes, test and merge changes automatically back into the main app. You should regularly backup your app and the database in case you need to restore. This lifecycle is best suited for citizen developers and IT developers creating small and simple non-critical apps used by a few users. 2. Multiple environments, single developer When you’re working alone on different environments like developm...
Read more

From Low-Code to Low-AI-Code.

-
Image
Low-code platforms like Oracle APEX have a clear advantage in the AI era, as the LLM generates the metadata for the app out of your functional specification, not the actual code itself. As the low-code platform vendor is in charge of the underlying code, you can rely on it to be maintainable , more secure and legally bulletproof . Let's go through these in more detail. Maintainable Vibe coding quickly leads to a code mess as the LLM doesn't really optimize the code, it just implements your request. On code level, an identical function might be implemented multiple times by the LLM. A low-code platform returns HTML/JS/CSS to the web browser out of the metadata in runtime based on optimized, proven internal code. This means that your app is always state-of-the-art when upgrading the low-code platform and should bugs arise, they are the responsibility of the vendor to solve, not the developer. More Secure Many security features in Oracle APEX are turned on or are restrictively se...
Read more

Getting up to speed with Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX)

-
Image
Want to start developing web applications with Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX)? Make sure you don't reinvent the wheel and adapt good practises from industry experts right from the start. Here are some tips for beginners: 1. If you don't already have Oracle APEX installed, don't install it yourself, but get a free workspace within minutes on apex.oracle.com  to be used for demo purposes. To learn about Oracle APEX in the Oracle Cloud, you can use the always free tier on cloud.oracle.com/free with two databases up to 20 GB database storage each without any cost. For production purposes, we recommend that you pay 120 USD/month (as of 22-JUN-2026) for the Oracle APEX Service on the Oracle Cloud or Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud. 2. Start making your first apps using one of the Oracle APEX tutorials: HyPlus (German):  apex.hyplus-group.com/development  (includes good practises!) Oracle (English): apex.oracle.com/hols 3. Read the APEX Developer's Companion: d...
Read more