Linear boards

From the boards, you can also access the Fluent Studio, which gives you fine-grained control over the look and feel of a chart, as well as the ability to edit parameters and the SQL that underpins the data. From here, data users can control how Fluent learns from each interaction.

Better data understanding

Next, we've added some new functionality to the Fluent AI. Fluent can now answer questions like "tell me about this data source" and will use the various descriptions and definitions that have been given to Fluent to answer this. Next, we added a custom intro message which team owners can set for each team. This can be used to contextualise the data and explain what sort of questions are answerable with the data and what sort of questions are not.

Improvements

• We've massively sped up Fluent's clarification step, this means that Fluent responds faster to you when you ask it a question.
• We improved how Fluent uses previously verified answers, to make it follow them more closely and also to give Fluent the ability to say "I've seen this before" while clarifying.
• Comments are a lot smoother and easier to use - they're essentially like Notion's comments now.
• We added a bit of polish to the locked state of boards.
• We added the ability to cache columns in a data source, which means Fluent will understand them better.
• Scorecards now look completely different, and include a lot more information (as you can see in the screenshot above!)
• We fixed a load of bugs with scatter plots - they now resize properly, have the right amount of axis ticks in the right places, and a lot more.
• Fluent performs significantly better on follow up questions than it did before.
• We make pivoting a bit more intuitive and made sure columns in the Studio data tables are aligned and ordered properly. More generally, these look a lot nicer.
• We fixed a few bugs with presence indicators.
• The query list pages perform far better and are much more intuitive.
• We improved board thumbnails.
• You can now download data from Fluent as Excel files, CSVs, PNGs, or you can copy the data from an answer to your clipboard and paste it directly into your favorite spreadsheeting tool (mine is Google Sheets).
• We added notes with transparent backgrounds.
• Overall this month we shipped five hundred and forty one small changes and improvements, let us know what we should fix next!

Improvements

• We implemented a better library for toast messages which is easier for us to use and nicer to look at.
• We fixed a bug where answer cards would be dragged when you double clicked on them.
• We improved the UI that shows you when you're offline and your changes are not being synced.
• A bug where your selection state was lost has been fixed.
• Various performance improvements.

You can now filter your answers in Fluent!

We've released the first version of filtering answers. This lets you quickly update an answer to do things like: change the date range on an answer (instead of last month, see last quarter's data, or last weeks), change the cohort for an answer (see the sales for a particular customer or team, for example) or even more complicated things. Fluent uses AI to pick which filters should be applied by default to a question, and understand which dimensions you're most likely to filter by. We've very excited about this feature so let us know what you think!

Improvements

• The UI for comments used to be blurry - it's sharp now!
• You can now hide answers again.
• We fixed some bugs where the canvas websocket connection would be lost.
• We improved the way text is rendered on sections.

Pivoting in Fluent got a lot easier

Previously, if you wanted to pivot data in Fluent you would have to explicitly ask Fluent to do it, which made it quite cumbersome to do! Now, we have a specific part of the AI pipeline that decides whether pivoting is appropriate and if so what the ideal pivot is. Please let us know how you get on with it!

Improvements

• Fluent does a better job of responding to requests in the right language now.
• We fixed a bug where creating and updating definitions would report erroring, even though it hadn't.
• We sped up how fast the Fluent app loads.
• We added resize handles to tables.

This week we mostly worked on bug fixes with nothing major to release.

Improvements

• Tool keyboard shortcuts are now disabled when the user invite modal is open.
• You can customise the default date formatting (particularly useful for american users!)
• We fixes some bugs where messages from the AI could be presented in the wrong order.
• We improved search for definitions and canvases.
• We did a load of performance improvements.

A new invite flow

When you invite your team mates to Fluent, you can now choose which role and which teams they have access to much more easily.

Excel export

You can now export answers to Excel files, as well as the CSV and PNG options we already have!

Improvements

• You can select multiple items on a canvas much more easily now. The UI for this also improved.
• We improved how the AI decides to generate additional data for scorecards.
• We redid the UI in the settings section of the product.
• We made datasets more customisable, with custom colours and icons so you can see which one you're using at a glance.
• We fixed a lot of small bugs!

Quite a big update this week!

Fluent has teams

Fluent now has teams! When you create a team you can choose which datasets it has access to and which users have access to that team, so you can control access to data better. Teams have their own canvases (renamed from dashboards!) and definitions. Dana has done a video explaining teams in more detail which you can see here.

A new sidebar

We've also completely redesigned the sidebar and moved a lof of features to the settings section which you can access by clicking the gear in the top right of the sidebar. We think it should be significantly easier to get around Fluent - let us know what you think!

Personal canvases

A few of you mentioned that you sometimes fee uncomfortable sharing your work in progress with your team. We've added a new type of canvas called a personal canvas which is only visible to you. You can create a personal canvas in any team.

Improvements

• We moved the question card title to be more helpful.
• We made various performance improvements to SQL queries.
• We added excel and png download for questions.

Another week of polish, bug fixes, and performance improvements so no major features to announce.

Improvements

• The question input box can now be multi-line for longer questions.
• We fixed a bug where the conversation with Fluent would have messages in the wrong order sometimes.
• Comments can no longer move around.
• We fixed decimal places not working in the data table.
• Fluent no longer asks for specific columns in the question asking panel.
• Locked dashboards have a better tooltip indicating who locked them.

Fluent learns from conversations

Fluent can now look back through the last few conversations and learn about your preferences from them. This means that if you've already told Fluent you prefer to see weekly revenue starting from Sunday instead of Monday, you won't have to tell it again. Fluent will also ask less clarifying questions when it thinks it has a good idea of what you're looking for.

Improvements

• Fluent is better at telling you when it can't answer your question with the available data.
• We fixed a bug on the data source page where we'd say you had unsaved changes even if you didn't.
• Heading nodes got a little bit of a facelift.
• We added some UI for when the conversation has gotten too long and we need to cut it off.

A better commenting experience

We've introduced two large changes to commenting this week. First, you can now @ your data team. This means that any business user can get help on whatever they're working on without having to specifically name someone. Next, we've added a comment sidebar so whenever you open the comment tool you can see all the comments on the dashboard you're working on. This makes it much easier to see what's going on in your dashboard.

Improvements

• The definitions page is now much more performant due to a variety of optimizations.
• We added a new question asking input which makes it easier to ask questions.
• We tweaked some of the prompts Fluent uses to answer questions, which makes it easier for Fluent to effectively use all of the data in your dataset.
• We fixed a bug where newly added columns wouldn't get descriptions autogenerated for them.