Assista - Analytica AI Assistant

New in Analytica 6.5

The Analytica A.I. assistant, named Assista, is a co-pilot that uses Artificial Intelligence to help you use Analytica and build models.

Note: In the early 6.5 alpha builds, it requires Analytica Enterprise or Optimizer to use.

Ask Assista for help or support using plain English, or even in other non-English languages. It knows what you are/were currently looking at just prior to switching over to the chat window, and it can access much of your model to provide you answers. It can also carry out many tasks for you in the Analytica UI.

Inaccuracies

It is important to understand that, like other AI systems, it is not always accurate. It makes mistakes and sometimes provides incorrect information. But if it leads you astray today, don't give up on it! We are improving it, and your questions will help it to improve in the future. With time, it will be more and more capable of helping you with all stages of model building and interpreting results.

Privacy (or lack of)

It is important to keep in mind that when you use Assista, your questions AND information inside your model will be sent to Lumina's servers as well as to OpenAI's servers, and may be used in a variety of ways to improve Assista in the future. We at Lumina are very privacy conscious in general, and will make our best effort to protect the information from uses other than for Assista improvement.

If you do not use the A.I. assistant at all, no information is sent, so you need not worry about this when simply using Analytica.

Scope

What types of things can Assista help you with? This section identifies some areas, but these do not fully cover its full scope.

Please ask it for whatever help you need, even if it doesn't match stuff shown here! It may surprise you, but even if it fails, your questions may inform Assista's engineers about what types of capabilities would be useful to focus on.

Assista relies heavily on the documentation attributes (Title, Description, Units) in your model, and on the arrows that you have drawn between variables (even if they aren't yet defined). Keep those populated both for your own benefit, but also to increase the quality of the assistance. You can even ask it to write those descriptions for you.

Using Analytica's UI

How do you ... in Analytica?

Ask it for the steps required to do something using the Analytica's UI.

Inaccuracies in its steps sometimes occur. But improving this accuracy is our first area of focus.

Navigating the Docs

As you likely know, the Analytica Docs are extensive. Assista often provides "see also" links it is response to relevant Docs pages.

Ask it for a list of functions of a specified type, for example, Or where you can find more information on something.

This general area is our second focus priority.

Performing actions for you

In addition to providing steps you need to take to accomplish something from the Analytica GUI, Assista can sometimes do it for you!

Open the graph of X { or edit table, result table, object window, etc.)
Change the color of X to blue
Write this description
Write this definition.
... and more

Explaining Analytica concepts

Ask it to teach you more about Analytica concepts.

Creative formulation

Mapping your complex, messy, real world problem to an influence diagram that captures the essential elements is a challenging task for human model builders. This is also one of the most exciting use cases for this new technology, especially in a collaborative analyst-assistant partnership.

Extreme competence at this is a long term future goal for Assista, but there is reason to believe that it could become quite good eventually.

Interpreting results

How do you interpret results, and how should you act based on the insights you gain from the model?

Today, Assista is unlikely to help much at this. For one, it doesn't yet look directly at the raw numbers or graph images in your results (or in your edit tables), even thought it is aware of your graphing dimensions (axes, keys) and table pivots.

Other

This list of ideas is by no means complete. If you could use some help while using Analytica, ask it even if it doesn't fall into any of these categories. There is a chance it might, and you might inspire us to extend its capabilities in new directions.