WATCH: Google lets you speak in natural language & get analytics reports

Instead of clicking around inside of Google Analytics to find the answer you want about your web traffic, wouldn’t it be nice to just talk to Google to get what you want? That future is coming, Google demoed today, thanks to machine learning.

Google’s Babak Pahlavan, who heads measurement and analytics products for Google, showed the coming capability today during the Google Performance Summit.

In one example, he asked by speaking, “How many users did we get from organic search in April?” and received the answer:

In another, as you can see below, he spoke, “What were my best selling products for April?” and again, got a fast answer:

This is all courtesy of that machine learning you’ve been hearing so much about Google doing. Most of that has been aimed at consumer-oriented products. But in this case, Google is using machine learning to understand what’s been said and to figure out how to parse the answers for advertisers, Pahlavan said.

When can you get this? Later this year, but only if you use the premium version of Google Analytics, Google Analytics 360 Suite.

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Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan is a journalist and analyst who has covered the digital and search marketing space since 1996. He is a cofounder of and advisor to Third Door Media, which publishes Search Engine Land, Marketing Land, MarTech Today and produces the SMX: Search Marketing Expo and MarTech events. conference series. You can learn more about him on his personal site & blog (and he keeps his disclosures page there). He can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.