A couple days ago, we were talking about Siri at lunch. Siri is the intelligent personal assistant that is available on iPhone 4S. It helps you get things done just by asking ― by using your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, place phone calls, look up information, and more. After that lunch conversation, I started to think how nice it would be to have a personal assistant in QlikView, one that would allow me to use my voice to do Business Discovery. I’d like it to talk back to me and guide me through the data to reveal the informationI need for decision making.

Then I started thinking that QlikView already has all of the pieces needed to get this working. It has extension objects capabilities, which can run custom code from QlikView to get the voice commands working. It also has text box capabilities to automatically generate the voice script with the data for the assistant’s audio. I thought about using free text to speech software to convert the text to audio.

So I did a little research on HTML5 and sat down with QlikView. Within about two days, I built a prototype. I got so excited about it that I gave my personal assistant a name: “Q.” Check out this video. I posted the QlikView application and technical information about creating the speech input and audio extension objects with HTML5 on QlikCommunity.

“Q” is a great example of QlikView’s extensible platform. QlikView provides developers with a comprehensive and integrated set of tools that help them expand the possibilities of a Business Discovery application. If developers are interested in adding speech input capabilities to a QlikView application, they can easily create an extension object by using QlikView Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and other technologies such as HTML5. Once the extension object is created, it can be used in other QlikView applications, just like any other QlikView object. If you are interested in learning more about QlikView’s extensibility, please visit the QlikView SoftwareDevelopment Kit (SDK) page on QlikCommunity’s Integrations and Extensions Community. The community provides documentations on QlikView SDK and APIs with sample codes.

By the way, if you are wondering what else “Q” can do, I am leaving that to your imagination. With QlikView APIs, it would be very easy to put the pieces together!