Natural language search

Use natural language to search for answers to your business questions. You can begin a search from the Search bar in the Home page, or by entering your question in the Search bar that appears in the top navigation bar when you navigate to a different tab.

Click the search bar labeled Ask any business question you have, select the Worksheet to search on, and type your question in natural language. You can specify the chart type for the resulting Answer in your question, for example "show me sales by region as a bar chart". You can change the Worksheet selected when you search from the Home page. When you search using the search bar in the top navigation bar, the search inherits the Worksheet you last searched on.

ThoughtSpot translates your question into a SQL query using a Large Language Model (LLM). When you enter your question, you will see the AI-generated Answer appear, along with a list of related Answers created by users in your team.

See Natural language search best practices for more information about how to best use natural language search.

Note that you must select a Worksheet to see an AI-generated Answer. If you use natural language search when the source is set to All sources, you see a list of user-generated Answers that match your query the closest.

Natural language search is disabled by default. To enable it, contact your administrator. Once enabled, your ThoughtSpot administrator can grant you access to this feature by assigning the Can preview ThoughtSpot Sage user privilege to your user group.

Edit the Answer

If you want to make any changes to the AI-generated Answer, click the blue title of the Answer and you will navigate to an editable version in the Search Data tab.

Click the Answer title to edit

Give feedback to AI-generated Answers

You can leave feedback on the accuracy of the AI-generated Answer by clicking the ‘like’ and ‘dislike’ buttons in the lower-right corner of the Answer. Giving feedback allows ThoughtSpot’s LLM to learn and increase the accuracy of its AI-generated Answers, and provides analysts the ability to review feedback using Sage Coach.

When giving feedback to AI-generated Answers in Sage, you tell ThoughtSpot precisely what search tokens to use to signify certain key terms. For example, when you search for "best performing products this year", ThoughtSpot responds with the top five products sorted by sum of sales. You can correct top five to top ten by clicking the thumbs-down icon and editing the Answer. ThoughtSpot then stores that feedback, and admin users and Worksheet owners can decide to apply the feedback globally, so that every time someone searches for "best" products, they receive the top ten results.

Enable or disable AI-generated Answers on Worksheets

Users can decide to disable or enable AI-generated Answers based on the Worksheets to which they have edit access. When natural language search is enabled, AI-generated Answers are enabled for all Worksheets by default.

To disable AI-generated Answers on a Worksheet, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to the Data tab.

  2. From the list of data objects, select the name of your Worksheet by scrolling or by searching the name in the search bar.

  3. Select the more options menu in the top right corner of the page. Note that if the Edit Worksheet and more options menu icon are grayed out, you do not have edit access to the Worksheet.

  4. From the more options menu, click Disable AI generated answer.

    Worksheet open to Columns view