Actian Explained #6 – Ask AI: Natural Language Search

Actian is shaping the future of business with AI ready data that is trusted, flexible, and easy to use. But how do you find that AI ready data? How do you search for it?

Many times the data you are searching for is findable with simple statements. If you are, for example, searching for reports about sales performance, you can simply type "sales performance reports." However, sometimes you are in a different situation, a situation where what you're searching for is only possible to express in a complicated way. Let's imagine, for example, that you do not only want to search for sales performance reports, but that you want to fit some the search so that it excludes some sales regions and focus on particular products.

You would have to know the operators of the query language and write a statement that is technical in nature, and that is not easy unless you are an expert. If you want to truly democratize data, you want every single employee to be able to search for data, and that makes technical search language a big obstacle. People lose time trying to learn how to search, and often they give up and in Actian, we take this very seriously.

Therefore, in the Actian Data Intelligence Platform, our vision is to remove the obstacle of complicated search, turning search into a simple experience via an innovative usage of AI. Tapping into our automatic layer. Our brilliant engineers are building, testing, and now continuously deploying a powerful feature that leverages AI so that your employees can search without friction in natural language.

And we call this Ask AI. Here's how Ask AI will work. Instead of you having to carefully translate your search statements for natural language into a struct statement with control fields and correct operators, you just type what you searching for, in natural language.

So instead of a long string that requires expert knowledge to build correctly, you can simply type this. Going forward, Ask AI will automatically understand that what is being searched for is written in natural language. It will understand the implicit structure of the search statement.

Ask AI will then match the semantic layer in the Actian Data Intelligence Platform and provide you the prioritized list of search results efficiently ranked by relevance thanks to the knowledge graph. In this era of AI semantics matter. It matters more than anything else because it is the key to accelerate and automate artificial intelligence with powerful precision.

To us at Actian, the perspective is, and has always been, that the data you search for should be easy to find. That is why we introducing Ask AI so that you are free to search in simple human language for data. We know that your data is your future.