Smart Assistant non responsive

[TM_Vis]

I am making my first attempt to use the smart assistant. The data is simple - one table with US Cities and their populations. I enable smart assistant and make a simple request “Show me the city with the largest population”. At one point, while trying to get this to work, my voice request would be transcribed into the search field… for some reason that isn’t working anymore - but even when it was, nothing would happen. Now the search field just contains the placeholder text. “View a table of USCities rows”. I am subscribed to the Pro version. At first I wasn’t and that was throwing me for a loop. I then updated to PRO and still nothing happens. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[tony1]

Hi @TM_Vis , can you let me know the name of your app and account number? I can take a look. Also, please go to https://www.appsheet.com/account/account#_tab_acctConfig and check the option that enables support access.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Hi Tony,

Hope you are well.
Actually this behaivor seems to be there since the smar assistance was given a birth by you, a few years ago… when the app is just a bit complex, then it dose not work. so I never use it.

[TM_Vis]

ID: 2635558
The name of the app is USCities. I may have stumbled upon what killing this whole thing.

Limitations*

Right now, you cannot filter by Text-type columns. You can overcome this limitation by converting your Text columns to Enum. For example, if you want to filter your data by State, make sure that your State column is an Enum with a list of states as its Enum Values.

I’m sure my attempts to search with the assistant was done without having the text declared as enums.

This is a huge limitation if it’s saying what it appears to be saying. For this particular app it isn’t a big deal but this is just a test app. The real app will be one that searches resumés which will contain a lot of text that cannot be expressed as an enum. The resumés will have been parsed and saved in excel sheets which will be the source data for the app.

The goal will to be able to ask something like “Show me the candidates who have worked at XYZ Company within the last 5 years” and to get the results in a list of the matching resumés.

Is this doable?

[tony1]

Hi @TM_Vis, that makes sense - the assistant doesn’t provide interpretations for text columns. It does work with one-to-many relationships. For example, if every Order has a Customer, you can say something like “Show me Bob’s orders”.

It sounds like your use case is more complex, though. You have a many-to-many relationship between Candidates and Companies, since a Candidate can work at many Companies and a Company can employ many Candidates. This is unfortunately not supported by the assistant feature right now, but it is an interesting use case that I will track. Do you mind if I move this thread to feature requests?

[TM_Vis]

Thanks for the assessment of the situation. And yes I"m fine with move the thread to feature requests.

[TM_Vis]

One more question. When the limitation states " Right now, you cannot filter by Text-type columns." . does it mean only “text” columns or does it take in columns of type “Address”, “Name”, “Email”, “Date” etc.?

[tony1]

That’s correct - those count as text.

[TM_Vis]

Hi Tony. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on Appsheets. I’m back on trying to get the Assistant to do anything at all. So now I have a new app called GsaDoer. It’s got 9 columns:

Each row represents the government perdiem rates for a particular state, destination and county. Multiple rows can have the same combination of state, destination and county but for different effective date ranges. Since the Assistant doesn’t work for TEXT columns, I’ve converted the STATE column to ENUM and entered in all 50 states manually so I can see if that will make the Assistant work if I say “Show me all rows for Florida” or any other state. Sadly, it still doesn’t work. If I type Florida as a normal search text, the results are correct. Using the Assistant doesn’t do anything.

Would you be able to guide me as to what I need to do to see the Assistant work. Hopefully the limitation of not filtering on TEXT columns goes away at some point. If not, and if this proof of concept I’m doing by search on STATE only works, i’ll need to convert the DESTINATION and COUNTY fields to enums as well… that will be quite time consuming.

Thanks.

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Following.
Smart assistance feature never worked with me, so I always disable.

Sadly.

[tony1]

Hi @TM_Vis, can you send a support ticket to support@appsheet.com with the name of your app? Also, please go to https://www.appsheet.com/account/account#_tab_acctConfig and check the option that enables support access.

In the mean time, if you’re looking to do in-app filtering (not necessarily using speech) you might want to check this new feature out: Filters in AppSheet applications - in Preview Program

[TM_Vis]

I don’t see how to create a “support ticket” to send. Do I simply send an email to support@appsheet.com describing my issue and include the name of the app?

[Steve]

Yep. Reference this community topic, too.