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The Q&A feature in Power BI lets you quickly get answers about your data by using natural language to ask questions about the data. This article describes supported configurations for Q&A, and how indexing and caching improve performance for each configuration.
Power BI Q&A supports the following configurations of data sources in the Power BI Desktop:
Using a Q&A visual in a report enables natural language Q&A by default. If you're using DirectQuery or live connect, a prompt appears.
In Power BI Desktop, to explicitly turn natural language capabilities on or off for a report:
For more information, see Limitations of Power BI Q&A.
Enabling Q&A builds an index, to quickly provide real-time feedback to the user and help interpret their questions. The index can take some time to build. The index has the following characteristics:
Power BI Desktop creates the index when you use Q&A. A small icon appears when the index is building. While the index is building, the Q&A visual and suggestions might take some time to load.
If your model changes or the index becomes outdated, the index must update. Because the index can take time to rebuild, the index updates only if you use Q&A in the same session as when the changes happen.
In the Power BI service, the index recreates on publish, republish, and refresh. Q&A index creation isn't always automatic, and can happen on demand to optimize the dataset refreshes. For DirectQuery, Q&A data indexes at most once per day, to reduce the impact on the DirectQuery source.
For more information on integrating natural language in your reports, see:
Events
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