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Wordsmith Takes First Place in Tableau Conference Hackathon

Laura Pressman
Product Marketing Manager
November 10, 2016

We’re happy to announce that the Wordsmith team secured first place in the inaugural Tableau Conference hackathon!

Congrats to the #data16 hackathon winners: Team Wordsmith from @AInsights! #DataDev pic.twitter.com/C4GhUvtr86

— Tableau Software (@tableau) November 9, 2016

The Winning Project

Our team built an interactive data visualization in Tableau that paired with Wordsmith and the Amazon Echo to narrate U.S. Presidential election results in real-time.

How?

The user first makes a request to the Amazon Echo, like “Show me the Battleground States.” The Alexa service that powers the Echo then gets a narrative summary from Wordsmith. It also sends a signal to our Tableau visualization to update the map. As the map updates, the Echo narrates what the user is seeing with the Wordsmith summary.

Check it out:

The Wordsmith Voice-Assisted Analytics hackathon project is a first for the Amazon Echo controlling a Tableau viz. Amongst the 299 participants, the Wordsmith hackathon project was the only entry to harness the power of Natural Language Generation while successfully integrating three APIs to narrate data from a viz in real time.

Imagine you could control Tableau with just your voice and use it to hear a live analysis of the incoming data in your dashboard. The Wordsmith Voice-Assisted Analytics project does just that.

Ellen Nadelhoffer
Tableau Senior Writer

Check out Tableau’s summary of the hackathon to learn more information about the other amazing hackathon contenders.

Screen Shot 2016 11 10 At 10 48 08 Am
Making final edits before presenting the Wordsmith hackathon project.

Congrats to our team for connecting Wordsmith’s NLG to Tableau and the Amazon Echo for such a unique, prize-worthy result. We’re excited about the endless possibilities of powerful integrations like this project and about adding a truly amazing trophy to the office!

To learn more about the Wordsmith integration with Tableau, check out a few of our interactive visualizations or request your own personal demo.

Laura Pressman is a Product Marketing Manager at Automated Insights, where she’s responsible for connecting the product, sales, and marketing teams to guide product strategy and market fit. When she’s not creating flow charts and planning via post-it mayhem at her desk, she’s probably gaming, nomming on sushi, or at the movies.
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