In keeping with the company’s mission to make the world’s data understandable and accessible to everyone, Automated Insights, the world’s leading natural language generation (NLG) provider, has recently announced a new integration in conjunction with their partnership with Tableau.
Built upon the recently released dashboard extensions feature included in Tableau 2018.2, the new Wordsmith Extension helps Tableau users seamlessly interact with their data and easily communicate insights by blending written analytics with visual analytics.
SourceForge recently caught up with Kaity Lloyd, the Public Relations Manager of Automated Insights, to discuss this new integration with Tableau. Lloyd also shares how the Wordsmith Extension for Tableau allows more businesses to make sense of their data and easily convey the right messages to their customers and/or employees at the right time.
Q: Catch us up since we last spoke. What’s new with Automated Insights? What are you particularly excited about at present?
Kaity Lloyd, the Public Relations Manager of Automated Insights
A: Since we last spoke, Automated Insights developed the new Wordsmith Extension for Tableau and further bolstered our integration with MicroStrategy. These new integrations enable customers to leverage the power of Wordsmith directly within their Tableau or MicroStrategy dashboards. This enhances the interaction users have with their data allows them to communicate insights more efficiently by pairing data visualization side-by-side with written analytics.
Leveraging Wordsmith allows more people in an organization to see and comprehend their data in an easier-to-understand, more actionable way. Even more exciting, the Wordsmith Extension for Tableau was recently showcased at the 2018 Tableau Conference in a presentation by our long-time customer, Allstate, who pride themselves on being a data-driven, innovative company and therefore use Wordsmith in Tableau to increase data adoption and engagement within their organization to make smarter, faster decisions. We’re also in the early development stages of a new offering, which is something we’re really looking forward to releasing!
Q: Why did you choose to partner with Tableau? Any particular reasons for choosing Tableau over other software companies that develop interactive data visualization products focused on business intelligence (BI)?
A: Our strategic partnership with Tableau stemmed from the fact that both Tableau and Automated Insights share the same mission and customers. We both want to make data accessible to all. While Tableau uses data visualization to help users see and explore their data, Automated Insights uses contextual written analysis to communicate data in a way that’s easy to understand. We both saw immense value in a data visualizations being paired with narrative, which is why we continue to nurture such a strong partnership. Similarly to Tableau, we have partnerships with most major BI platforms, including MicroStrategy, TIBCO Spotfire, and Qlik. In addition, Automated Insights has an established network in place with system integrators like Genware, Interworks, and Icimo. System integrators are integral to enhancing our offering and seamless integration for companies as we expand our reach in BI.
Q: Wordsmith for Tableau brings the speed, power, and intelligence of NLG technology directly inside the dashboard and automatically transforms the data into clear, written analytics. How is this particular pairing/partnership helpful to executives and data analysts?
A: With a sharp focus on the user experience, Wordsmith for Tableau enables all business users in an organization to automatically receive real-time written analytics that is completely unique and relevant to their role and responsibilities. The integration is an easy setup that enables two-way communication via the Extensions API and the Wordsmith API. Users want the flexibility to extend the humanistic, prescriptive function to meet their specific needs all within the comfort and familiarity of Tableau’s user interface. It’s a feature that simply makes the process of adding extra functionality frictionless, the heavy lifting of developing custom connections is eliminated with the Wordsmith for Tableau Extension.
This particular pairing is significantly helpful to both executives and data analysts for different reasons with the same overarching goal. Executives spent valuable resources to enhance their organization’s BI strategy, ensuring that data has become more accessible to employees throughout the organization. However, given that executives are typically strapped for time and the fact that they’re not data experts leaves ample room for misinterpretation, especially considering the fleetness of which they evaluate the data. Because of this, executives often rely on analysts to regularly and manually provide key insights which don’t allow the full realization of the value an analyst was hired for, which is analyzing and surfacing insights through extensive data exploration. Wordsmith’s written analytics outline the top insights to act upon, each relevant to the end-user’s context and role within the company, empowering the executive to quickly and easily understand the data they are seeing while enabling the analyst to scale intelligence in more beneficial ways for higher-value tasks.
Q: In what ways can Wordsmith for Tableau help organizations enhance the dashboard experience and enable them to make better, data-driven business decisions? Can you offer some sample use cases?
A: Leveraging Wordsmith for Tableau, companies like Allstate and NVIDIA are augmenting analysis to arm their teams with the information to confidently make rapid business decisions and increase dashboard engagement throughout an organization. Wordsmith provides instant, digestible reports, an automated data expert, and real-time analysis as users explore their dashboards. Dashboards become more easily consumable. Visualizations alone can still leave room for misinterpretation when there are varying levels of data expertise in an organization, Wordsmith for Tableau bridges the gap in understanding to clearly and accurately communicate data insights to everyone which, in turn, drives action throughout a company. Wordsmith also enhances the dashboard experience by making massive datasets and congested dashboards a bit less overwhelming.
For example, Allstate’s analytics team relies on Tableau to share valuable data information. However, the sheer amount of data, misinterpretation, and the lack of time for analysis resulted in low adoption and engagement with their dashboards. By integrating Wordsmith for Tableau Extension with their existing sales quota dashboard, Allstate turned their data into clear, natural language to empower their sales team to make role-based, data-driven decisions. The NLG approach to communicating a dashboard addresses the once near-impossible task of supporting each and every individual user by providing one analyst for many users.
Q: Are there specific steps that customers/users need to take in order to use Wordsmith for Tableau?
A: If you can build a data visualization in Tableau, you can build a narrative with Wordsmith. They’re very similar. In order to use Wordsmith Extension for Tableau, you must have a Wordsmith account. Tableau users who don’t yet have a Wordsmith license can still download a demo of our extension to see how Wordsmith works with a Tableau Desktop pre-packaged data set. To use the Tableau extension, a company must use Tableau 2018.2 or later, otherwise they can connect using Wordsmith’s JS API for earlier versions. Once connected, users design their narrative in Wordsmith just as they would design a visualization in Tableau. With the Wordsmith Tableau Extension, users can link their Tableau dashboard directly to Wordsmith, providing written analytics automatically generated directly in the Tableau dashboard in real-time, side-by-side with visualizations.
Q: Natural Language Generation (NLG) enables enterprises to gain a competitive advantage by transforming data into clear, human-sounding, and insightful narratives. What is your advice for businesses that have yet to get started with NLG? And what specific measures or steps do they need to take in order to make the most out of Wordsmith?
A: For businesses yet to get started with NLG, it is important to keep in mind the current state of their business operations. Most organizations have a lot of data, but aren’t getting the most out of it. If a company finds itself constantly running into the same issues with misinterpretation, lack of data engagement, timely manual reporting, repetitive content output, or challenges deriving meaning from data, then innovating solutions with NLG to drive automation is their best next step. Today, scaling operations completely reliant on manual work is unsustainable. On the other hand, there may be nothing wrong with the way a company is currently doing business but adopting new technology like NLG may be what takes them to the next level of success. Companies want the best return on investment, using valuable data scientists or analysts for repetitive, manual tasks that take time away from their expertise in forecasting isn’t the greatest use of that resource.
To get the most out of Wordsmith, it’s important to have an overall strategy that clearly defines goals and purposes of the tool. Essentially, know where you’re at to know where you’re going. Defining the purpose and evaluating key stakeholders who will be using Wordsmith will drive how many licenses a company needs, how in-depth the narratives should be, what language will be used, and what additional platform features could be useful.
Q: How competitive is the business intelligence and data analytics market today? How is Automated Insights continuing to stand out in the market?
A: As companies become more data-driven, the business intelligence and data analytics market increasingly becomes more competitive because the need to communicate, understand, and act upon data becomes a top priority. Modern BI is now a necessity for organizations that want to grow beyond competitors. In today’s market, they can’t afford to misinterpret data and lose money based on a decision made without full knowledge and data insight. Dashboards, reporting, end-user self-service, advanced visualization, and natural language are some of the most important technologies for businesses who want to glean more insight and make better, data-driven decisions.
Automated Insights continues to stand out by going above and beyond the market standard of natural language generation offering. Wordsmith is self-service, allowing control over the output to be in the subject matter expert’s hands. Nobody knows a company and their needs better than the company itself. In addition to providing descriptive analytics, clearly describing key data points as intended by the author, Wordsmith goes beyond competitors to provide diagnostic and prescriptive analytics tailored based on the viewer’s role within the company.
Q: Aside from Wordsmith for Tableau, are there other new solutions or developments you want to share with our readership?
A: We recently launched Wordsmith’s Data Engine feature for MicroStrategy and Tableau’s visual insights which allows for even more flexibility, giving users more control and freedom over how they transform their data to insights. The Data Engine bypasses the need for custom code and connects MicroStrategy’s platform in a fully self-service way. BI users need the functionality to discover and communicate numerically-driven insights side-by-side with their visualizations. With the addition of the Data Engine feature to MicroStrategy and Tableau, we’ve made exploring, discovering, and communicating insights easier – users can customize the data output, highlight trends and outliers, and create written analytics in one centralized location with complete control over the content.
Automated Insights
Established in 2007 and headquartered in Durham, NC, Automated Insights (Ai) enables companies in data-driven industries, including e-commerce, real estate, business intelligence, media, financial services, and more, to achieve operational efficiency and content scale. As the creator of Wordsmith, the world’s first self-service natural language generation platform for business intelligence, Ai empowers today’s organizations to develop human-sounding narratives from data, making it easier to produce real-time, written analytics, personalized reports, and stories at scale. The Wordsmith platform is utilized by companies and partners including the Associated Press, MicroStrategy, Cisco, NVIDIA, Tableau, Qlik, TIBCO, and more.