When a Present dashboard is running you can use the Natural Language Query (NLQ) Chat Bot to interact with visualizations in an intuitive way with plain English. The ease and fluidity afforded by the Chat Bot facilitates data exploration by encouraging spontaneity, helping allows users to quickly explore the data in an organic and unrestricted way using English. In Discover, the Chat Bot can be used to start discoveries, while in Present it's mostly used to interact with existing visualizations.
Note: this feature is available with the Enterprise Edition license only.
Chat Bot Querying
The Chat Bot employs almost identical techniques to simple NLQ questions. This includes time intelligence, geographic intelligence, pro-noun intelligence as well as tools for handling syntax, like word stemming and a thesaurus. Users can also drive filtering and sorting. The Chat Bot supports specialized wildcard searches on the current data model and support for several special keyword commands.
The details for how the Chat Bot functions are covered in the Discover Chat Bot help, while details on how to write NLQ questions are covered in general NLQ help.
- Click here to learn more about the NLQ Chat Bot in Discover.
- Click for more details on writing NLQ questions and NLQ intelligence
Accessing the Chat Bot in Present
To open the Chat Bot, launch your presentation in runtime. From the visual's panel, click the NLQ Chat Bot button when you hover over it.
The chat panel will appear and you can begin chatting to interact with the visual. Simply enter your request into the chat's text box, and the relevant interactive function will be performed.
Navigating the NLQ Chat Bot
The Chat Bot is primarily a window that allows users to write a sequence of questions into a text box (black arrow below) and trigger the changes to the currently selected visual. After typing in text, users can hit the ENTER key on their keyboard or click the Go button (green arrow).
Reset
Click the Reset button (yellow arrow above) to reset the chat session and the visual back to its original state.
New Query
Click the New Query button (red arrow above) to restart the chat and the new blank query. All hierarchies and measures will be removed from the visual, allowing you to build a new query from scratch.
Entity Prompt
As you type, you will be prompted with key elements from the data model (blue arrow above). You can select these instead of having to type or guess these items. Use of wildcards can also make accessing these items easier.
Suggestions
Click the Suggestions button (purple arrow above) to see a list of the most popular questions for the current model that match the types of questions you are asking in the session. This can give you a good sense of what sort of information people commonly look for in the model where the selected visual is located. This will not show up if there is not enough question history in the system or there are no matches to your line of questioning.
Wildcards and Keywords
While typing, the Chat Bot will automatically show a list of hierarchies and measures that match the word currently being typed (after first 2 characters). You can use the wildcard character to show hierarchies and measures in the current model in the event you don't know what to type.
- Show Hierarchies and Measures: * is used to show a list of all measures and hierarchies in the model where the given query was built. This can help you to quickly find hierarchies and measures, which is especially useful if you don't know the exact name of the item you're looking for. It can also help you to spot items that might be of interest.
- Show Hierarchies: *h is used to show a list of all hierarchies in the model.
- Show Measures:*m is used to show a list of all measures in the model.
- Click here for more details and examples for how to "chat with the bot"