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AWS Brings Natural Language Querying to BI with QuickSight Q
Amazon Web Services' business intelligence (BI) platform Amazon QuickSight can now process user queries written in normal, everyday language.
The new feature, dubbed Amazon QuickSight Q, became available this week to users subscribed to the Enterprise edition of QuickSight. Currently, it only supports queries in English. AWS' announcement on Thursday didn't indicate if or when it plans to expand into other languages. Pricing is determined by the number of queries or users.
AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr provided a demo of QuickSight Q in this blog post. QuickSight Q uses machine learning to interpret user questions and requests that are written in plain, natural language.
It can "automatically understand the meaning and relationships among business data, providing users with accurate answers and relevant visualizations in response to questions in seconds," AWS said in its announcement. "The machine learning models that power Amazon QuickSight Q are pretrained on data from various domains (sales reporting, ads and marketing, financial services, healthcare, and sports analytics), so it can also understand complex business language and provide accurate answers and visualizations."
Other approaches to natural language querying can take months of preparation and data modeling, AWS explained. There can be a quality and performance trade-off, as well; responses may be accurate or quick, but often not both. QuickSight Q promises to fill those needs, without requiring extensive BI expertise.
"An easy-to-use editor allows customers to refine the way Amazon QuickSight Q understands questions, removing the need for complex data preparation before users can ask questions of data in natural language," AWS said. "Because Amazon QuickSight Q does not depend on prebuilt dashboards and reports, users can explore all their data and are not limited to asking only a specific set of questions, providing end users with the insight they need in seconds."
There are already several customers using QuickSight Q, including the National Football League, Forwood and PeopleScout. More information is available here.