Usage of "Assistance" natural language search service

[Koichi_Tsuji]

I’m not sure exactly how many months are now since Appsheet introduced “Assistance” feature to enable users of App to search the contents of the app using natural language.

For me, I was excited to see this one at the time they released, however, I have never used in my live apps.
Wondering how many of users in community are using the same feature routinely and regularly?

Reasons of the low usage for my case are +

1. The response of the results are super slow
2. After typing the texts, not sure if the app is running a search or not as no indicator is given.
3. The results of the search are not necessarily accurate, not pulling the target data I expected to have as a result.

Search the entire contents of the app feature is super useful provided that it works fast and reliably in my opinion, but unfortunately my view is there is rooms for Appsheet team to improve this particular feature.

Just to get the quick stat, would you mind to help a quick vote, how frequently you use this feature on your apps?

Thank you for your attention.

• Never Used
• Sometimes (occasionally)
• All the time

0 voters

[MultiTech]

I attempted to make an app based around the functionality of this assistant. One of my clients is a tele-health company, and anyone who’s worked with doctors will tell you that things need to be simple and fast. Push a button, it happens… done.

My thought was that the interface of using your voice would be epic for them. They could say something like, “Show me patient Whoever.” and views would be shown. Then throw in things like, “Okay, start a new patient plan,” for calling the creation of a new form for that patient - you see how doctors would love this.

Unfortunately, that was a year or so ago and the feature was still very new and raw. The potential is there, but performance was an issue. As you said @tsuji_koichi, the search time is pretty slow - if you add on top of this that the computers that would be running this are old ass POS hospital computers…

Maybe with the larger team, and ones from GCP - who have all sorts of tricks they can bring to the table (in regards to neural nets, AI, and deep learning, etc.) - things will get a major upgrade in the coming months.

PS: How did you do the survey thing??? It’s dope!

[Koichi_Tsuji]

Hi, Matt,

Thank your for sharing your experiences I appreciate for that.
Yes, the performance is the major issues for now, it looks taking forever feeling to return the information back from the server based on the texts to search.

Usually I type in, rather than using my own voice, due to two reasons. One is English is not my mother tongue, my pronunciation could be bad for computer to recognize. haha.
Secondly, the microphone Icon on the search bar is not noticiable. It should be HTML issue, but when we open the assistance view, the mic icon on the top right is almost cut off. Better to place to slightly left side so that people can realize the voice recognition function is available.

Yes, I agree with you. I hope the larger team with them will give a good shot to improve this feature so that the response is going to improve, it will be responded super fast and more precisely. I wait and see what s happen with my fingers crossed.

Not sure the technical background, but the search might be happening on the backend (server side) rather than front end (client) so it is slowing down the performance. Either way, I need improvement! I will raise a post of feature request, to call for improvement, although this is not a type of new feature…

Please vote on that, mate.

Koichi