Anyone that works in a business knows it is time consuming. With so many daily tasks, the last thing people want to do is spend time manually looking for insights in a data analytics platform. Fortunately, now people can save time by speaking instead of writing queries to obtain insights and listening to answers instead of reading them.

Zoomdata and Microsoft Power BI have developed a query processing interface to natural language generation technology from Amazon and Microsoft respectively. Zoomdata integrates its eponymous analytics tool with Amazon Echo and Microsoft Power BI integrates with Cortana. These interfaces could potentially revolutionize the way people access data and obtain insights.

Echo and Cortana take a spoken query and decompose it into instructions that are sent to a Zoomdata or Microsoft Power BI server, which then executes the query and sends the results back to Echo or Cortana, which translate the data into an auditory response. In Amazon Echo, the human-generated voice is named “Alexa”.

“We want to be able to help users ask simple and concise questions effortlessly and get high-level answers and summaries,” said Quan Luu, Director of Zoomdata Labs. 

For example, you can say, ”Alexa, ask Zoomdata what state has the most number of transactions?” or “Alexa, ask Zoomdata which product has the most number of sales?”. You might also ask Alexa to produce visualizations, such as a bar chart, which can be viewed in a Zoomdata application.

Today, customers need to predefine the queries that personal digital assistants like Echo and Cortana can answer. But this limitation will disappear in the future, Luu said.

Use Cases

Natural language queries promise to expand the potential user base of analytics. People no longer have to learn how to use an application to submit a query or find an insight. Now, people can speak a question and get a verbal answer, as opposed to pointing and clicking within an analytics tool or application. It also enables those who are visually or physically impaired and cannot see or use a keyboard to launch queries and obtain insights.

Wayne Eckerson, founder of Eckerson Group, a BI and analytics research and consulting firm in Boston, believes natural language interfaces could emerge in niche markets where workers in fixed locations require a hands-free environment. These include factory floor workers, delivery drivers, and airline pilots, among others. These tools might also become a productive way for mobile or office workers without ready access to a keyboard or computer screen get information quickly.

Zoomdata will soon offer a software development kit that enables customers to integrate Zoomdata with Amazon Echo. Microsoft has already integrated Power BI with Cortana and the interface is available now for Windows 10 users.