As Tableau looks for ways to make data more accessible to a greater number of people across an organization, it will be announcing later today at the #Data21 customer conference the ability to query your data inside Slack by asking questions using natural language. The announcement builds on previous integrations with Slack. Francois Ajenstat, chief product officer, speaking at a press event on Monday ahead of the conference, said that the new integration is about bringing the full power of Tableau data into Slack where people can collaborate on it in various ways. That means you can get an alert when data you care about changes, but you can also interact with it right in Slack without having to switch applications. "Slack also becomes the place to be able to ask questions of data so users can find all of their content right here in one interface. They [don't] have to leave Slack. They can search the entire Tableau repository -- all the dashboards, all the data sources are available right there," he said.

Seattle, Washington data analytics company Tableau wants to make it easier to get straightforward answers to sales questions. Toward that end, it today announced the general availability of Ask Data, a natural language processing feature for Tableau Server and Tableau Online that enables users to pose queries and get a response. It also debuted Tableau Data Management -- a new subscription add-on targeting data prep scenarios -- and a pair of revamped smartphone clients. Ask Data is available as a part of Tableau's latest release, Tableau 2019.1, and supports the platform's full range of live and extract data sources. Using Ask Data to get an answer is as simple as typing in a question like "What were my sales this month?",

What if you could directly ask questions of your data? Ask Data, Tableau's new natural language capability, allows people to get insights by simply conversing with their data. In this latest Data Science Central webinar, members of Tableau's Ask Data team will demonstrate how they are lowering the barrier to analytics and leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a tool for visual analysis.

Tableau Software added a range of smart capabilities to its products in Tableau 2019, led by natural language processing for its new Ask Data voice recognition tool. Unveiled at the 2018 Tableau Conference, the Tableau new features include the ability to find insights by entering questions in Ask Data in text or verbal speech, more data modeling automation and Tableau Prep Conductor, an add-on product that gives users more centralized administration and scheduling options. Many of the features are available now in the public beta version of Tableau 2019.1, which was also unveiled at the conference. The natural language processing (NLP) capabilities had been among the more anticipated Tableau new features. Many BI and enterprise software vendors have been looking to add NLP to their products, and it's a technology that Tableau itself hinted at earlier this year. Essentially, Tableau users can type questions about their data into a search bar using plain language -- even with some slang -- and receive the answer.