Power BI AI Visual Smart Narratives

Power BI has given us the following AI visuals:

• Key influencers
• Q&A Visualisation
• Decomposition Tree

And now we also have smart narratives to work with. Many companies want to create report that includes text in regards to the report they are looking at to help the user understand the key takeaways. This usually involves someone manually adding in text to the reports.

Not great for interactive reports that update on a regular basis. this is where smart narratives come in. Smart narratives create the text in an interactive way for you.

If its good, it should eliminate the need to add in information manually for your users, which is a huge win.

Lets have a look at it in action on the Adventureworks Report

At the most basic level you can simply drag smart narratives into your report

Smart narratives describes your data to you. This is all really good information. what happens when I select a data point on the report like select 2011 in Sales amount and order quantity

The narrative updates to tell you about just 2011 so our smart narrative is even better, It updates with every click the user makes.

For my Top 10 Products table, I want a smart narrative that just gives me information on this visual and not every visual on the page so I right click on the visual and choose Summarize

And again, we are getting good information for that specific visual. You need to think whether the visual can tell this story on its own or if narrative would help. I tend to see smart narratives as something that sits on a page to tell a story across all the visuals.

Changing the Summary

This is great but there will be times when you do want specific information in your smart narrative. I am going to remove the smart narrative for the visual, and replace with one for the entire products report page.

Click on the smart narrative and then +Value to add a value

I want it to tell me how many items have been sold of top value products. the red line tells me that it doesn’t know what sold means and we need to define this item .

Click on Sold and then Define Sold

Here I go to Field Synonyms in the Q&A Setup to define a new synonym for order quantity because order quantity can be expressed as quantity sold. I have added quantity sold as this is what has been searched for.

Back in Teach Q&A I ask the question again

And this time it understands what I mean. I submit this to train the Q&A. and this time we find this specific query because its in Q&A. I can now format the question to get an answer for the smart narrative

After saving, the number simply appears in the smart narrative. I deleted it and moved the cursor to the beginning on the smart narrative. then I wrote.

The quantity sold of top value products is:

And then clicked review, found the item and + to insert item to place it exactly where I want it

from this I can see that I can use the Q&A tool to format questions that I can then add into the smart narrative, adding synonyms where necessary to create even more easy to understand questions.

Smart narratives and Q&A work perfectly together.