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Get natural language narratives in Power BI Reports

Headshot of article author Patrick Baumgartner

Today we are thrilled to share a collaboration with Narrative Science and a new custom visual: Narratives for Power BI, which automatically communicates insights from all connected Power BI data sources — in natural language. As you interact with your data and visualizations, Narratives for Power BI dynamically delivers insights in narrative form, just like what you’d expect an analyst would write. These narratives help more users to interpret data and visualizations in a more natural way and provide real-time results of analysis you can immediately share with others.

This custom visual is fueled by Narrative Science Quill, an advanced natural language generation (Advanced NLG) platform. By seamlessly adding NLG into Power BI using the custom visual available here, your reports can automatically include intelligent narratives generated by Quill:

  • Tell stories from all available data: Narratives can be generated directly from the wide range of Power BI's connected data sources and can be used to uncover trends hidden in visualizations.
  • Act as a companion analyst: Dynamic narratives continuously update as you interact with your data and visualizations, providing natural language insights driven by descriptive, diagnostic, and predictive analytics.
  • Can be easily customized and shared: You can easily adjust the narratives according to your preferences and share these narratives with others, enhancing the context of insights.

This is a great example of how custom visuals in Power BI enable you to extend the capabilities of Power BI – and integrate them seamlessly with Power BI’s breadth of data connectivity and report visualizations. Narratives for Power BI supports Power BI and the upcoming April 2016 release of Power BI Desktop. To try out Narratives for Power BI yourself, download the custom visual, add the visual to a report, then simply choose the values and dimensions you would like to have narratives generate for. It’s even fully responsive to cross-filtering. Now that's some advanced data storytelling!