What is Smart Narrative in Power BI?
Smart Narrative is a visualisation in Microsoft Power BI that uses Artificial intelligence (AI) to interpret data and generate commentary on the data presented.
Smart Narrative works like an assistant analyst, providing insights that may not be readily apparent. Power BI uses AI to analyse the data and auto-generate a summary.
The narratives are dynamic and respond to cross-filters and drill-downs in adjacent visualisations. The generated text and values will be automatically updated to reflect the selected filter.
The narratives fonts are also customisable so that you can edit the presentation of the generated text.
Application
Smart Narrative can deliver significant time savings if you need to summarise the results of a report or visualisation. It identifies and describes trends and key takeaways from your report and generates a ‘smart narrative’.
Smart Narratives have the flexibility to be applied to a particular visual or to a report page. The feature tells the story of your data. Smart narratives can help provide automated written insights from complex data, accelerating the interpretation of data and making reports easier to understand.
Smart Narratives can provide up to four summaries per visualisation or up to 16 on a page. The location and size of visuals determines the number of summaries generated.
When Power BI Smart Narrative features are applied to several visualisations on a report page, Smart Narratives will automatically avoid generating the same narratives for different visuals. For example, a page may display sales by customer along with sales by sales person and customer in a stacked bar chart. Smart Narratives is intelligent enough to avoid mentioning the customer twice on the same page. As a result, with complex data, by focusing on one visual, Smart Narratives can potentially generate more insights.
See it in action
In this 2-minute video, we demonstrate how to add a Smart Narrative to a Power BI report and ask it to add additional details to the default narrative.
With a better understanding of data, decision-makers can make more informed decisions to improve outcomes for the business. Learn more about Microsoft Power BI here.
