TimeXtender's New Support Copilot: Xpilot

TimeXtender launched its own online chatbot in June 2023: Xpilot. This ChatGPT-based application is designed to quickly and easily provide users with information and support, serving as a search engine, user manual, and knowledge base all in one. Our Business Intelligence Consultant Martin Memelink puts it to the test.

Troubleshooting

Xpilot is designed to help with all questions about the TimeXtender software and related aspects. Who better to explain that than Xpilot itself?

The main use case is as a next-gen search engine for troubleshooting problems in TimeXtender. When something unexpected happens in the software, it can be a challenge to find out what's going on and where the solution can be found, especially for new users. Xpilot is a valuable new tool for this. After trying out various situations from daily practice, it's clear that Xpilot can give useful answers on a wide range of topics.

Take the image below, for example, where a question is asked about missing records. Xpilot gives a handy step-by-step plan for tracking down the cause. The culprit in this example could be a primary key violation, and by following the suggestions in the answer, the user does indeed quickly figure that out.

Xpilot can also help with how to deploy to Power BI. When a common question about this is asked, Xpilot flawlessly provides the necessary steps to solve it. The Power BI on-premises data gateway is still missing as a possible cause of the error, but overall this answer is very helpful and available in a flash.

Other examples of helpful topics to ask about include general questions on data-driven working, required architecture (infrastructure), and SQL. Although this technically falls outside the TimeXtender software itself, Xpilot can still generate sensible tips about these too.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations in using Xpilot that stand out at the moment. Xpilot is programmed to only give TimeXtender-related answers in the first place. In addition, Xpilot will mostly give English-language answers, likely because the support pages are in English. It's also currently not possible to input rows of data as a prompt, so Xpilot can't (yet) help with analyses of anomalies or data quality. In the future this could be interesting, so that Xpilot could make recommendations based on source data, but for now that's still a way off.

A well-known limitation of ChatGPT is slowness under heavy load. Xpilot sometimes seems to suffer from this a little too, but during testing an answer took an average of 10 seconds, which is acceptable compared to the time it takes to find the right information yourself. Unlike ChatGPT, however, Xpilot doesn't have a button to stop the generation of an answer, and it processes only one prompt at a time. So if you accidentally send the wrong prompt, there's nothing to do but wait it out.

It's also worth keeping in mind that how a question is phrased matters. Xpilot won't answer questions unrelated to TimeXtender (“I'm not sure about that”). If you get this answer to a relevant question, you can sometimes still get a useful answer by rephrasing the question. Xpilot also seems to be sensitive to spelling and capitalization. For example, if you ask what xpiloT or xpiilot is, you won't get an answer in either case.

Since June 2023, the chatbot has been in the public beta testing phase. TimeXtender says the model will be continuously updated and expanded, so users can look forward to future improvements and new functionality.

Holistic

As a company, TimeXtender pursues a holistic vision, which holds that how we as people spend our time matters, hence the name TimeXtender. For this blog post, we also looked at whether these aspects come through in Xpilot.

According to the bot, the power of TimeXtender is, in any case, no laughing matter.

And since TimeXtender as a company has an affinity for mindfulness breaks, meditation, and breathing exercises, an overworked data engineer can get some inspiration for this through Xpilot as well.

There are more topics from TimeXtender culture that Xpilot can explain, such as terms like Xfactor, Xgoals, and Frankenstack. Funnily enough, Xpilot will also bring up the term Frankenstack on its own for tricky questions about integrating different data systems.

Written by Martin Memelink
Business Intelligence Consultant