When Amazon Web Services launched QuickSight, its business intelligence service, in 2016, the company wanted to provide product and customer information to business users, not just developers.
At the time, available natural language processing technologies were not robust enough to provide customers with the tools to search databases effectively using plaintext queries.
Now, as these technologies mature, Amazon is returning with a significant update called QuickSight Q, which allows users to ask a simple question and get the answers they need, according to Andy Jassy's keynote at AWS re: Invent.
"We will provide natural language to deliver what we think is key learning," said Jassy. "I don't like that our users need to know which databases to access or where the data is stored. I want them to be able to type in a search bar and get the answer to a question in natural language.
This is what QuickSight Q sets out to do. It's a direct challenge for a number of business intelligence startups and another example of how machine learning and natural language processing are changing business processes across multiple industries.
"The way it works Q. Type a question in natural language [like]... "Give me the final twelve months of selling product X?" ... Get an answer in seconds. You don't need to know tables or know data stores. "
It's a compelling use case and explains how AWS is integrating machine learning to deliver more code-free services to customers. "Clients didn't hire us to do machine learning," Jassy said. "They hired us to answer questions."
