In today’s digital economy, organizations are in a race toward digital transformation, with the fundamental goal of empowering people at every level of the organization to make data-driven decisions and to improve business outcomes. However, despite considerable and growing investment in the field of data and analytics, many organizations still struggle to drive pervasive adoption because business users don’t find Business Intelligence (BI) systems intuitive enough. Using Natural Language Query helps bridge this gap, as users can now describe what they want in their own words.

“Simply ask” is a new natural language query interface developed by Sisense, a world-leading BI platform, which enables users to ask analytical questions. The platform translates users’ questions to SQL type queries and visualizes the results. In this talk, I’ll present the flow and architecture of “Simply ask” and share the challenges we faced, in terms of data gathering, user interaction with the platform, and generalization to various domains.