IDG Contributor Network: Will Alexa become my companion data analyst?

Alexa joined our family at Christmas.

She lives inside Amazon’s Echo device, now in our kitchen, and responds to our voice commands. Nothing feels more natural than asking Alexa to turn on the radio. There are no buttons, no scanning, just a voice command to start up what we want to listen to. As my children grow up, they’ll get to a point where they couldn’t imagine pressing buttons to do something as menial as start up some music in the room they are in.

But what if Alexa could help me understand my data? Stephen Few, a leading writer in the field of data sensemaking, recently wrote a great article explaining why he thinks natural language processing (NLP) does not have a future as an input mechanism for making sense of data.

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