Microsoft Integrates Cortana with Power BI

Microsoft has just released a public preview of the integration of its virtual assistant, Cortana, into Power BI, a business analytics and analytics service. It allows a user to generate useful insight on business data in Power BI.

The integration allows a user to ask Cortana questions about data stored in Power BI. Power BI uses natural language to allow users to understand their data better. The new search feature, Q&A, allows users to type or voice their questions to Cortana. Cortana analyzes the data stored in the application to generate relevant answers to the questions asked. The answers can be in the forms of numbers, reports, charts, maps and complex graphs depending on the type of question asked.

"After that any user who has access to the dataset in Power BI, via regular Power BI sharing, groups and content pack features will be able to get answers from the dataset in Cortana in Windows 10. Through a partnership with Microsoft Research, we're honing a growing list of algorithms to discover and visualize correlations, outliers, trends, seasonality, change points in trends, and major factors within your data, automatically, within seconds," said Patrick Baumgartner, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft Power BI.

This concept is a part of Microsoft’s bigger strategy regarding Cortana Analytics Suite (CAS), which includes Power BI, machine learning and speech & text analytics, to solve business-related issues. CAS is not required to access Power BI insights using Cortana. Also, Cortana can be used independent of Power BI at any moment.

Along with Q&A, Microsoft released a Quick Insights feature through a partnership between the Power BI team and Microsoft Research that uses various algorithms on data to give users a bird’s eye view of the data in the app with regard to trends, correlations, outliers and change points. This information can be pinned to the analytics dashboard within Power BI in order to continue tracking the information analysis.

“Power BI's new Quick Insights feature allows you to run a variety of analytical algorithms on your data to search for potential insights with the click of a mouse. For 10 to 12 seconds Power BI will iterate across your data searching for subsets of data you may find interesting. If we find something that meets the criteria of one of our insight categories we visualize it, along with any other insights we've found, for you to browse," Baumgartner noted.

This feature is available on Windows 10 version 1511 that released in November. Once a data source is selected in Power BI, Cortana can access the data set. Microsoft’s newly designed template for Power BI ensures that the canvas is the size of Cortana’s window.