April 2025 Updates to Amazon QuickSight

Did you see the news about Google's latest AI innovation? 

They've created an AI model called DolphinGemma, specifically designed to communicate with dolphins! 

Dolphins are making waves and words

This project uses Google's Gemma open AI models to analyze and potentially "speak" with dolphins. The model uses a technology called SoundStream to tokenize dolphin vocalizations, allowing sounds to be fed into the model as they're recorded.

The Wild Dolphin Project has been studying these intelligent marine mammals since 1985, creating extensive video and audio recordings along with behavioral notes. 

Researchers believe that understanding the structure and patterns of dolphin vocalizations could reveal whether their communication constitutes a true language.

What I find most interesting is how Google trained the model using the Wild Dolphin Project's acoustic archive, creating an audio-in, audio-out model that predicts the next sound in a sequence, just like human-centric language models do with text. 

The goal is to identify patterns that could lead to a shared vocabulary. Mindblowing!

Now, you might be thinking… “What does this have to do with me?”

This dolphin news got me thinking about our own data communication challenges. If we're developing AI models to speak with dolphins, shouldn't we also be focusing on better ways to communicate with our business data? (That's a pretty great segue, huh?)

Amazon QuickSight: Speaking Your Data's Language

We haven’t talked about Amazon QuickSight in quite awhile and some pretty cool announcements were recently made around the AWS service. 

Just as Google is trying to decode dolphin whistles, Amazon is making it easier for us to understand what our data is "saying" through natural language.

Amazon Q in Embedded QuickSight

Amazon recently launched Amazon Q in embedded QuickSight, making its Generative BI capabilities generally available in embedded dashboards and consoles. 

These capabilities allow business analysts and users to easily build and consume insights using natural language — essentially creating a universal translator between humans and complex data.

Some key features include:

• Executive summaries that let users quickly understand essential insights from any dashboard in seconds
• Dashboard-authoring capabilities that leverage natural language to generate visuals and perform complex calculations
• A multi-visual Q&A experience that developers can integrate into applications with just a few lines of code

Users can simply prompt Amazon Q using natural language to generate shareable documents or presentations that explain data, extract key insights, and recommend actions to improve business outcomes.

New Advances in Data Stories

Amazon Q in QuickSight just added another powerful capability: data story generation.

With Amazon Q's data story functionality, authors and readers can quickly generate a first draft of their data narrative with minimal effort. 

Rather than starting with a blank page, you can now leverage Amazon Q's prompts and visuals to produce an initial draft incorporating all the details you provide.

The system combines your specific prompts with selected visualizations to provide contextually relevant details tailored to your unique data story. Amazon Q understands the context of your data and offers recommendations that actually make sense for your specific use case.

For teams looking to accelerate their reporting cycles or wanting to communicate data insights more effectively, this feature dramatically reduces the time from analysis to presentation.

Dashboard Versioning

Another great update is dashboard versioning and the ability to publish any analysis to any dashboard. 

This means authors can build new analyses with updates and publish them to existing dashboards that readers already have bookmarked. 

No need to send out new links or deprecate old versions!

Plus, if any issues arise with a new dashboard version, authors can easily revert to previous versions while they work on fixes — keeping dashboards in a working state throughout the development process.

Decoding Dashboards and Dolphins. One day at a time

The language barrier between humans and data is finally breaking down. However, it was not on my 2025 bingo card that this would happen simultaneously to decoding dolphin speak.

Have you tried any of these new QuickSight features yet? 

Until next time,
Ryan

Now, here's our weekly AI-generated image & the prompt I used to create it. 

"Generate a photorealistic image of a dolphin using a computer. On the computer, you can see the dolphin is visualizing data with Amazon QuickSight. The dolphin is wearing a beret and an AWS t-shirt."

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