Business intelligence and analytics firm Tableau today announced that it has acquired ClearGraph, a service that lets you query and visualize large amounts of business date through natural language queries (think “this week’s transactions over $500”). Tableau expects to integrate this technology with its own products as it looks to make it easier for its users to use similar queries to visualize their data.
Tableau acquires ClearGraph, a startup that lets you analyze your data using natural language
Typically, you’d have to know SQL or a similar database query language to pull information out of most enterprise databases. Recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning now allow services like ClearGraph to understand more about the underlying database and then take these sentences and essentially translate them into database queries. Given that Microsoft’s Power BI and other competitors already offer this capability, it’s no surprise that Tableau is also looking into this (though Tableau argues that — unlike the likes of Microsoft — it can be a neutral party given that it has no investment in any particular cloud or on-premise technology outside of its own).
Indeed, Tableau’s Chief Product Officer Francois Ajenstat tells me that…