Charts, Tables and Rich Blocks
The assistant answers in whatever form fits the question. Knowing what it can produce helps you ask for the one you want.
The formats
| Block | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Table | A set of records to read, sort or export |
| Chart | A comparison, a distribution or a trend |
| Photo gallery | Subjects, detections or plate images |
| Camera cards | Cameras it found, ready to open |
| Diagram | A relationship or sequence worth drawing rather than describing |
| Code | A query or expression, formatted for reading |
You can ask for one directly — "as a chart", "just give me the rows" — and it will re-render the same answer in the form you asked for.
Tables
Tables behave like a small results grid: sort by a column, and export what you are looking at. When a table is longer than the answer shows, ask for more, or narrow the question — the assistant is usually better at narrowing than you are at scrolling.
If a table is the beginning of real work rather than the end of a question, build the equivalent saved query. Saved queries are repeatable, shareable and can drive a dashboard; a chat answer is neither.
Charts
Charts are the most useful thing the assistant produces, because a comparison is easier to see than to read. Ask for a breakdown by any field it can group on and you get a chart with a legend, axes and readable labels.
Charts are not dead ends. Where the underlying data supports it, you can go from a chart to the records behind it — the same movement as drill-down from an aggregate, reached a different way.
A chart worth keeping can be pinned to a dashboard. See Pinning a Chart.
Photo galleries and camera cards
Where an answer concerns people, vehicles or cameras, the assistant returns pictures rather than identifiers. A gallery of detections is far quicker to scan than a list of detection IDs, and the images lead to the records behind them.
Camera cards let you open a camera straight from the answer, which is the natural next step after "which cameras cover the north entrance?"
Diagrams
For questions about how things relate or what happened in what order, the assistant can draw a diagram rather than describe it in prose. Diagrams carry into an exported PDF, so an explanation you liked in chat survives into a document you can send on.
Exporting
Tables and charts can be taken out of the conversation:
- Export a table's rows for use elsewhere
- Pin a chart to a dashboard to keep watching it
- Generate a PDF of the finding — see Reports and Email
A note on trusting the numbers
Blocks are rendered from data the assistant actually fetched, not from prose it composed. When a figure matters, open the rows behind it — the ability to do that is why the blocks exist, and it takes one click.