2020 IDEAS Global AI Conference

It often takes a long time for business users in enterprises to get the right data and insights, even if the data is well organized and structured. This is because they may not know where the data is located, how it is modeled, and how to frame the right queries for their needs. As a result, traditionally, access to data and analytics has mostly been limited to power users and specialist data scientists with varying degrees of analytical and technical skills. This is where conversational analytics comes in. This paradigm allows any user to ask text and voice questions, in natural language, of their data to a bot and receive back a natural language and visual result. In this talk, I shall present our efforts and experiences in building a conversational analytics platform on a chat-based interface. Our approach combines natural-language processing (NLP), dialog management, natural-language generation/narration, data understanding and modeling, augmented analytics and automated visualization generation. I shall describe how we handle complex natural language questions against rich datasets like "How many cases of Covid were there in the last 2 months in states that had no social distancing mandates by type of transmission", and further, enable users to dig deeper into the results in a conversational manner to uncover hidden insights.