Authoring Q&A - Amazon QuickSight

Authoring Q&A

Converting to the Generative Q&A experience

If you have existing Amazon Q topics, you can easily convert these to leverage our new generative capabilities. Navigate to a topic, and then choose Convert next to the topic name. You will then be prompted to Duplicate & Convert Topic in a dialog box. We duplicate your topic for you so that the conversion to our beta experience does not impact your end users. Once you are satisfied with topic performance in the new experience, you can unshare the original topic and share the new one.

QuickSight interface showing Topics page with a list of datasets and their details.

Named entities

Named entities are one of the most important components of topic curation. The information contained in named entities — specifically, the ordering of fields and their ranking — is what makes it possible to present contextual, multi-visual answers in response to even vague questions. Authors can find named entities by navigating to a topic, choosing the Data tab, and then choosing the Named Entities. From here, authors can preview or edit existing named entities, and create new ones.

Topics page showing a list of datasets with their status, last modified date, and usage.

Authors can configure the following facets of named entities:

  1. Fields: Choose a dataset, and then choose which fields from that dataset to include. This defines the scope of data that will be considered when using this named entity to answer enduser questions.

  2. Field Rank and Presentation: The relative rank of the dimensions and measures in a named entity determines how those fields are used when generating contextual, multi-visual answers. Note in the following demo that adjusting the relative rank of Profit so that it is higher than Sales leads to different data being displayed. By default, the order of fields in the table visual is the same as the field rank. However, you can control these two individually by turning off Sync table view with field ranking.

  3. Show / Hide in Presentation: Fields that are included in named entities can simultaneously be hidden from the tabular presentation of the named entity, while still providing additional context in other components of the answer.

SaaS Sales interface showing Named Entity tab with Order Details and Logistic Details entities.

 

Field ranking interface with customer, segment, contact name, profit, and sales fields.

Measure aggregations

Authors have fine-grained control over how Amazon Q aggregates measures in topics. Across QuickSight, measures are defaulted to SUM,unless they have custom aggregations defined in a calculated expression. To change this in Q, navigate to the measure in the list of data fields, and specify a different default aggregation. You can also disallow aggregations, which will prevent them from being applied even if a user specifically asks for them. Lastly, you can specify that a measure is non-additive. This is useful for pre-computed metrics, such as percentages, which should not be re-combined in any way. Doing so will force Amazon Q MEDIAN or AVG depending on your use case.

Data fields configuration interface for SaaS Sales dataset with various dimensions and measures.