What is Plotly AI?

AI is everywhere and promises to improve our ability to analyze, visualize, and extract insights from data. Experimentation with ad hoc AI tools is being done across the data science and analytics development cycle to quickly generate basic visualizations and web apps from Python code. While this approach has created lots of excitement for analytics-as-code, users we speak to are finding that general AI code editors run out of steam fairly quickly on scenarios beyond trivial toy apps and prototypes. They’ve shared frustration with AI development reaching the point in a project where the AI is no longer effective for fixing bugs and entering a kind of AI debugging doom loop.

Generative AI can perform much better when applied in a more specialized way within an opinionated data app development framework and with context on the development workflow. That specialization can be realized through more narrowly-defined problem spaces with better context via RAG and by selecting custom domain-specific AI models suited to specific tasks.

Bringing Data Apps into the AI Age

Applying generative AI in this specialized way, Plotly has introduced Plotly AI, an innovative set of capabilities empowering data teams to chat, code, or click their way to building interactive Python data applications. By incorporating generative AI, Plotly AI simplifies and accelerates the process of creating data and AI applications and interactive visualizations, making it more accessible to users at every level.

In the past, crafting interactive data applications in Python required some rudimentary coding skills and knowledge of a set of libraries and frameworks like Plotly Dash. Today, AI lowers the barriers to getting started but can quickly lead into the AI debugging doom loop due to the combined issue of the knowledge gap of the developers and the AI’s lack of context on the specific libraries and frameworks being used. To address this gap, Plotly AI introduces AI-assisted development adapted specifically to Plotly data visualizations and Dash data application development resulting in higher-quality code generation, fewer hallucinations, and a seamless integrated experience with App Studio’s visual UI mode to keep developers out of the AI debugging doom loop.

What is Plotly AI?

Plotly AI is a set of AI-enabled capabilities seamlessly built into Plotly products that helps data teams analyze data faster and create production-quality, interactive Python data applications using Plotly. Within App Studio in Dash Enterprise, Plotly AI powers the AI Chat and Data Explorer modes. Dash developers can also embed a chat experience for the users of the data applications they create using the Chatbot Builder and more quickly answer questions using the Ask AI documentation bot. Together, these are the growing ways Plotly AI is enhancing the use of Dash open source and Dash Enterprise. 

AI Chat Mode in App Studio

At the core of Plotly AI is the AI-Assisted development feature, which offers a chat-based interface within Plotly's App Studio. This interface allows users to interact with the platform using natural language, streamlining the process of building data applications. Whether it's generating a specific chart type or exploring data trends, users can simply describe their requirements, and Plotly AI translates these prompts into functional code and visualizations.

AI Chat in Plotly App Studio provides a user experience which combines the full flexibility of code with AI-assisted code generation which is tailored specifically for data app development in Python with Plotly. Today, AI Chat provides chart generation, Dash component generation and data wrangling.

An array of AI models have been embedded which are specific to the task and context of the data app building and deployment experience and workflow. In the 5.7 release and later, Plotly AI uses OpenAI GPT models to help users simplify data app development, with the ability to answer how-to questions, explore documentation for technical solutions or syntax, and to find trends within data. Users can also offload boilerplate coding tasks and quickly generate code with Tabnine for code completion, which is trained on context from Plotly data visualization, Dash, Polars, and related data science and data engineering libraries. Our intention is to allow users to choose their LLM provider in a future release.

Data Explorer Mode in App Studio

Plotly AI's Data Explorer Mode enhances the data analysis workflow by allowing users to more easily explore their data in an enhanced interactive table view. Charts can quickly be created directly from the Data Explorer. This feature facilitates rapid iteration and insight generation, enabling data scientists to visualize trends and patterns without the need for extensive coding.

Custom AI Chatbot Integration

One of the standout features of Plotly AI is the ability to embed custom AI chatbots into data applications. These chatbots, powered by large language models (LLMs), provide users with conversational interfaces to interact with data. This means users can ask questions and receive insights in real-time, making data exploration more intuitive and engaging. Moreover, these chatbots can be tailored to align with a company's brand identity, ensuring a seamless user experience. Plotly customer Broadband Insights recently demonstrated their use of the Plotly Chatbot Builder.

Plotly AI also includes  AI-powered documentation chatbot capable of answering complex queries and learning from user behavior over time. The feature is available as a free-to-use “Ask AI” chatbot in the open-source Dash and Plotly graphing library developer documentation.

What are the benefits of Plotly AI?

• Provides higher-quality code suggestions than general AI coding editors and additional ease-of-use through the visual mode of App Studio
• Broadens the access to data analysts and other roles on the team who may be less comfortable with analytics-as-code with Python and the Dash framework
• Offers the ability to scale with AI securely to production with one-click deployment, cloud platform scalability, and application embedding
• Simplifies data app development while providing the full flexibility of code

What’s next for Plotly AI?

The introduction of Plotly AI marks a significant milestone in the evolution of data visualization and data application development. As artificial intelligence continues to advance, tools like Plotly AI are poised to become indispensable in the data scientist's toolkit, enabling more efficient workflows and deeper insights. The emphasis on natural language interaction signifies a shift towards more intuitive interfaces, democratizing access to data analytics and empowering a broader range of users to harness the power of their data.

Learn more and try it yourself

Register for the webinar to learn more about Plotly AI in Dash Enterprise and get started building AI-assisted data apps.