'Data Storytelling', never heard it described that way, but when building process maps, we often described it in the form of a flow, or journey, or 'story' to make it clear how changes occured. So I like the idea of telling it as a story to make it easy to understand.
Firms specializing artificial intelligence (AI) that generates written text are developing tools that will allow you to have sophisticated conversations with common business databases like Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI, Microstrategy, Qlik, Spotfire, SAP, and Tableau. Instead of typing at your computer to gain insights, you'll be able voice-chat with your computer about sales forecasts, investment options, and five-year plans.
"It is totally possible," says Robert Weissgraeber, chief technology officer at AX Semantics, a firm specializing in natural language generation (NLG). Weissgraeber says getting to the point where you can easily converse with your database is mainly a problem of collecting and unifying the data into a source that can be connected to the right tools.
"The big thing that has changed in the past two years is that, thanks to commoditization of natural language generation tools, a conversational business database is not a special project with a million-dollar price tag anymore. It can be set up for a far lower price point, allowing even smaller businesses to implement and benefit from it."
Many consumers have used basic conversational databases without even realizing it. When you ask Alexa or asks a question like "What happened today in history?" or "How does the intercom work?" or "How many ounces are in a pound?" you're using a conversational database.
Natural language generation firms like AX Semantics and Arria NLG to take this technology and apply it to a business database, so businesses can verbally ask questions of their databases, like:
"How do our sales for Q4 this year compare with Q4 sales for last year?"
"What are the five top-selling products in our product line this year?"
"Who are the top three salespeople in our corporation in each of our eight regions?"
Software from NLG companies can respond to such questions by relying on pre-programmed code templates that are activated by the questions, which instruct it how to obtain the information in a company's database, then report its findings verbally.
The level of detail such software is able to produce is limited by the number of questions companies want answered. Some companies may be satisfied if the software can produce verbal answers to 10 crucial questions, while others may want their managers' top 100 questions answered.
Many NLG can create custom conversational databases because they already have tools that can query databases via a text prompt and respond with a short text paragraph. Migrating to verbal questions with verbal responses from a computer is an enhancement of what they already are doing.
Narrative Science, for example, currently offers an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that, on receipt of a user request for a chart, graph, or other visualization in Microsoft Excel, will respond with a text explanation of the chart, graph, or visualization. This graphics-to-text explanation tech—which is a precursor to a verbal explanation of the chart, and what Narrative Science refers to as 'data storytelling'—has been a welcome relief for many business users, according to Anna Schena, the company's director of growth marketing. Schena says many business users find charts, graphics and other business illustrations difficult to understand and easy to misinterpret.
Says Schena, "Instead of forcing people to learn how to analyze spreadsheets or explore dashboards, data storytelling uses simple, easy-to-understand language and one-click collaboration features to ensure that everyone in your company actually understands data, all the time. With data storytelling, your team can read a personalized story that tells them what they need to know about their business, tailored specifically to their needs, automatically."
Schena says data storytelling technology is "intelligent," in that "it naturally articulates the most important and interesting information to each employee, every day, and it allows them to share that information with each other, too." .... '
No comments:
Post a Comment