Siri meets Business Intelligence

As you may know, Apple’s latest iPhone, the 4S, has a virtual assistent in it called Siri. You can ask Siri questions or tell it do something for you, just by using your voice. For example “What will the weather be tomorrow?” or “What is my next meeting about?”. This is very cool stuff!

So, as we have seen this big move towards mobile business intelligence over the last two years with tools like RoamBI, MicroStrategy (and now even SAP has awoken), how cool would it be to go one step further and let Business Intelligence meet Siri?! Think of commands like “Who is my top sales guy in Germany for 2011?”, “Call this person now!”, or something like “Siri, give me the total sales for customer BMW”.

Dutch SAP BI colleague Ronald Konijnenburg checked the possibilities to make this work and came across an interesting tool called Siri Proxy:

Siri Proxy is a proxy server for Apple’s Siri “assistant”. The idea is to allow for the creation of custom handlers for different actions. This can allow developers to easily add functionality to Siri.

After installing Siri Proxy on a Ubuntu (Linux) machine and checking some existing plugins from the Siri Proxy community he took up the challenge to write his own plugin. This plugin should be able to execute SQL statements and query any database (in-memory or not). With some technical help on the Ruby programming (Ruby is the language Siri Proxy is written in) a working plugin was created in a very short time period.

As a proof of concept a MySQL database was installed on the Ubuntu environment, with a simple table containing the key figures Sales and the objects Sales rep, Customer and Date, loaded with some random data. Now, by asking Siri a question like “Give me total sales for customer Google”, the spoken words are translated into a SQL statement that looks something like SELECT * FROM Sales.Sales WHERE Customer = ‘Google’. After executing this SQL statement on the table the sales amount will be returned. Siri now can nicely tell you the answer.

Check the video below to see a demonstration of Sire meeting Business Intelligence. The second video (click the more… button below) gives a bit more background info.

Again, great job Ronald! So what’s next? Siri talking to SAP HANA?

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