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Tableau has added a new feature called “Ask Data”. This is a natural language processing (NLP) based solution that provides answers to typed questions. Visual insights immediately follow to answer the questions. The function is intended for employees who have no special expertise in programming or using data.

With Ask Data, analytics should be usable by everyone, says Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer at Tableau. Earlier, the company bought the natural language processing start-up ClearGraph. The technology of that startup was the basis of Ask Data.

The function further uses artificial intelligence in the form of algorithms that the user must understand the intention. For example, if a user asks: “Show me the sales data of American furniture”, Ask Data will know that it should filter results by product category “furniture” and country “United States”. In this respect, ‘America’ is synonymous with ‘United States’ and is therefore supported. As a result, the results need to be more accurate.

The software can also understand that questions can be interpreted in different ways. It does this by correlating the questions with the history of previous users’ questions in order to understand exactly what they mean. Ask Data is now available and integrated with Tableau Server and Tableau Online. There are no additional costs involved.

Other functions

Ask Data is just one of several new features in Tableau’s two main products. There is also a new mobile application for Android and iOS with a dashboard and visual insights that are adapted for smaller screens. In addition, there is a new Google Ads connector for marketers, with which Tableau can be used to analyse website data.

In addition, a new product called Tableau Prep Conductor was launched. This product has data management capabilities to prepare and manage data from different sources.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.