Last week, the world’s leading search engine, Google announced that it would integrate the voice-activated assistance feature in the Google Analytics in its mobile app. This comes as a great news for the users as they would now be able to ask queries in the tool using the natural language; this would make the previous structured query system outdated.
The users can access the feature by clicking on the ‘ask a question’ section, which would soon be integrated into GA. However, Google announced that the ‘ask a question’ feature, for now, will only be available in English and it will be rolled out for all the users globally. While the feature is now going to be a reality, the concept was first announced by Google at its advertising and analytics events in San Francisco in 2016. The feature is built on the Analytics Intelligence, which was rolled out in September 2016.
Babak Pahlavan, the head of Measurement and Analytics at Google, said that the company was highly motivated to the Analytics more user-friendly and increase its accessibility through machine learning. He further said, the machine learning capabilities of Google has significantly accelerated the development and the launch of the natural language feature.
Several surveys have corroborated that nearly 70% of the small and medium sized (SMEs) business from around the world do not use the analytics. It is thus apparent that there is a lot of room to simplify the tool to make it more accessible for the SMEs and help the take advantage of the analytics to improve their business prospects. Pahlavan, said that with regards to the survey results, the voice-activated assistance feature would be a great boon for business owners as it would help them get answers to many of the usual business related questions. However, you need to know that the GA voice system will not be able to answer all the questions as yet.
For the time being, the GA voice assistance system is equipped to answer only the ‘what’ question, however, soon, Google will improve the feature to answer the ‘why’ questions, said Pahlavan. The measurement and analytics head stated that Google sees the voice assistance and machine learning as a way to simplify the GA usage and to make it more democratic in the near future. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 people from around the world use GA on their mobile devices every month, with a vast majority of the users using it every day. With the new ‘ask a question’ feature integrated on the GA app, it is sure to increase the engagement and the usage over the mobile.
