Getting started with Spotter

In this article you’ll learn the basics of using Spotter, including where you can use it, how it creates answers to your questions, and how you can edit those answers.

For details on recently added Spotter capabilities, see Spotter capabilities.

For information about the capabilities available in each version of Spotter, see Spotter versions.

Where you can use Spotter

Depending on how Spotter is enabled, you have the following options for using Spotter:

Go to Insights > Home, and ask a question in the Spotter question box at the top of the page.
Go to Insights > Spotter, and ask a question.
Click the Spotter button when hovering on any visualization pinned to a Liveboard.

If none of these options is available to you, contact your ThoughtSpot administrator.

How to use Spotter

To ask a question in Spotter, do the following:

(Optional) If you’re asking from the ThoughtSpot home page or from the Insights > Spotter page, you can select a different data source before you ask your question, or let cross data model search help select the correct data source for the question (if cross data model search is enabled). For more information about cross data model search, see: Cross data model search in Spotter.
Enter a question and click the submit button , or press the Enter key.

When the question is submitted, the submit button turns into a stop button , which you can use to stop Spotter from loading the question, and you can resubmit.

Spotter provides an AI-generated answer to the question.

Here are common things you can do with Spotter’s answer:
- To make changes to the answer, click the Edit button.
  
  For more information, see Understanding a Spotter answer.
- To switch between chart and table view, click the table/chart toggle button .
- To download the answer in PNG, XLSX, or CSV format, click Download.
- To let Spotter know if it got the answer right, do the following:
  - To upvote, click the thumbs-up icon .
  - To downvote, click the thumbs-down icon .
    
    These responses provide feedback to your ThoughtSpot administrator in the Spotter Conversations Liveboard. For more information, see [learnability].
- To copy the text summary of the answer, click the copy response icon .
- To ask Spotter to verify the answer, click the Double check response icon .
- To save the answer, click the Save button. After you save your answer, you can access it later in the Answers page.
- To add the answer to Spotter’s memory, click + Add to memory
  
  Spotter treats successive questions in a conversation as a follow-up. You can ask as many follow-up questions as you want.
  
  If you want to ask a question to start a new analysis, click the Reset button. On the home page, Reset lets you start from a fresh question on the selected data source. On a Liveboard, Reset takes you back to the original visualization.

For complete details on the elements of the Spotter experience, see [spotter-user-interface].

Understanding a Spotter answer

When Spotter answers your questions, it surfaces its response information in the form of the answer title and the search tokens used to construct the answer. When you ask a follow-up question, Spotter highlights the changes it made in search tokens to answer your question. You can also hover over formulas to see how they’re calculated, and edit them within Spotter.

To see a full-screen view of a visualization or table, click the expand arrows image in the top-right corner of the answer

Edit a Spotter answer

To edit a Spotter answer, click the Edit button above the Spotter question box. The Edit Answer window opens.

You can add or remove query tokens, change measures and attributes and even drill down by different attributes directly in the answer while in edit mode or even in the conversation itself.

To save your changes, click Done editing. Otherwise, click Discard changes.

If your ThoughtSpot administrator enables Add to coaching from chat, the check mark and X x icon are replaced by the + Add to Coaching and "Is this useful?" buttons. For more information, see Add to Coaching.