An Overview towards “Smart Narrative” Feature in Power-BI.
To all Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Engineers, and the people who love to play with data, Power-BI has been always a boon for creating awesome data visualizations, charts, and many more features to explore. Adding towards the development in Natural Language Processing(NLP), Power-BI has brought a great feature known as “Smart Narrative!” in September 2020, Which will bring out insights from our given visualizations in form of interactive/dynamic Text Boxes.
We have been using Power Point text boxes, interactive headers, or custom visuals to add narrative to their data, to explain the insights out of the data, All these options either lack interactive data, interactive and customizable text, or use automatic insights. The Smart Narrative visualization helps to quickly summarize visuals and reports by providing relevant out-of-the-box insights that are customizable!
In order to enable Smart Narrative in Power-Bl, go to:
File > Options and settings > Options > preview features > click Smart Narratives.
After Enabling the Smart Narrative feature, it may appear in your visualizations window.
Well, This can be used efficiently to understand the data, get to the key points faster, and explain the data to clients in a much better manner. The Smart Narrative can be thought of as a sort of smart text box, where you can have pieces of text that can be completely dynamic. We can actually format each word, or each sentence, or each character in a whole different way. We can apply Separate Sales font sizes, font types, and many more, which helps to bring out and constructing dynamic comments instead of just having a fixed text, also we can make only some part of the text dynamic depending on the requirements.
This works as a normal text-box, the difference is that it is more dynamic in nature instead of static. It uses Natural language processing, we can write some text directly into the box or we can click “Add Value” to make some part of the text as dynamic, based on provided visualizations. One issue with Smart Narrative is that it doesn’t provide any kind of custom conditional formatting options to the users.
There always comes a difference between human and artificial intelligence. Al
is fantastic at identifying connections, correlations, and possibly causation with the data provided. Considering a narration going to a respective client stating “Sales have increased by Xx In Source Y” or “ABC Item X is overspent against budget by Y”. These statements are all valid, which are possibly provided by the Smart Narrative feature by Power-BI, but they are not the insights that need to be captured! The insight comes from the statement that “Sales are up in Source Y because of the promotion of product X”, etc.
In the coming future, Al can be trained to derive these associations with data. But, what if the causative events for sales is a periodic event such as an early winter or late summer or a catastrophic event (fire, floods, coronavirus lockdown). The questions like What needs attention? what should we do less of? Are we doing well and should do more of? Are not ticked by the Smart Narrative.
Coming towards a conclusion, a Smart Narrative is a great tool for generating an automatic summary of the provided visualization. Some points which humans may fail to catch can be collected by this feature, which would help us to bring insights. Since it’s the latest release by Power-bi, it has a whole lot of potential for development, but considering the current scenario, it may be a bit less reliable as discussed in the above points.
Well, these were my views regarding this new feature “Smart Narrative” by Power-BI, and expressed whatever I felt using it at the first glance. Share your experiences and views in the comments below, and “Like” this blog if it was helpful!
Thank You!
