The following previews a blog that originally appeared on MicroStrategy employee Stephen Lippens’ personal blog in April 2017.
On April 19th, 2017 I presented two tracks on the technical capabilities of leveraging Amazon’s Alexa to interact with the MicroStrategy analytics platform and covered use cases such as:
- How many [documents] were created since [March 5th, 2017]?
- What [reports] were created [today]?
- Send the [report] [Sales Analysis] to my email
- Who is online right now?
- Revoke web access for user [username]
- Grant web access for user [username]
- What is my [cost] for the [category] [books]?
- What is my [revenue] for the [region] [central]?
*Note: The words in brackets [] are dynamic text that allow the user to have flexibility in their request.
The purpose of the presentation was to shed light on the kinds of actions an enterprise can take through voice-controlled applications such as the Echo Dot. The overall feedback was incredibly positive and got many people thinking about how they could apply this within their own organizations. My second track was a technical demonstration on how to create an Alexa Skill to ask MicroStrategy how many users were currently online in their system, and so I wanted to make this sample public to those who are interested in investigating this capability for themselves.
Summary
The implementation can be broken down into three main components:
- The Alexa Skill definition:
Hosts the utterances and intents the skill should attempt to process
- The AWS Lambda endpoint:
Contains the backend logic to perform the actions required
- The MicroStrategy Task call:
A MicroStrategy service call that returns data from MicroStrategy back to the Alexa app
To learn more about this topic watch our on-demand webcast, "Amazon's Alexa: Key Analytics Applications That Deliver Voice-activated Reporting."
Pre-sales Solutions Architect at MicroStrategy
Stephen Lippens is a Solutions Architect specializing in pre-sales opportunities requiring MicroStrategy API’s and customizations. He has 9 years of mobile development experience, 7 years of BI experience and 6 years of MicroStrategy SDK experience. Stephen has been in a number of roles previously at MicroStrategy including Technical Support Engineer, Product Support Manager and Sales Engineer. He graduated from The George Washington University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.