Asking questions
Asking Belta
The chat page is where the work happens. This covers the composer, the widget menu, follow-ups, Fast mode and how your conversations are kept.
The page
On the left is your chat history, with a New Chat button above it and a search box for finding an old conversation. In the middle are the messages. At the bottom is the composer, where you type.
If your workspace has more than one connection, the current one is named at the top. Change it before you ask, because a question is always answered against the database that is selected when you send it. On a phone the history and the database picker live behind the menu button rather than in a sidebar.
Just ask
Type the question the way you would say it to a colleague. You do not need to name tables, use the exact column headings, or phrase anything as a query. Ask which branch did worst last quarter, not select branch from sales where.
Ask in Arabic or in English. Belta replies in the language you used, and it understands a question that mixes the two, which is how most people actually write.
Choosing what the answer looks like
By default you get a written answer. The Widgets button beside the composer adds a visual output to it.
- 1Press Widgets and choose Chart, Table, Map or File.
- 2Chart and File open a submenu rather than switching on by themselves. Pick a type from it: Bar, Line, Pie or Area for a chart, Word, Excel, PDF or PowerPoint for a file. Table and Map switch on as soon as you press them.
- 3Your choice stays on until you turn it off, so a run of related questions all come back drawn the same way.
Follow up instead of starting over
A conversation keeps its context. After an answer about last quarter's revenue you can simply ask to split it by branch, or to compare it with the quarter before, and Belta knows what it is splitting or comparing.
Use this. A precise first question followed by three small corrections gets to a better answer than one long paragraph that tries to say everything at once.
Belta often ends an answer with a few suggested follow-ups. Clicking one sends it as your next message.
While it is working
A status line under the message says what is happening and counts the seconds. It reads Thinking while Belta is working out an approach, and changes to name what it is building when it starts producing a chart, table, map or file.
The send button becomes a stop button while an answer is streaming. Press it if you have realised the question was wrong; the partial answer stays in the conversation so you can see how far it got.
Fast mode
Fast beside the Widgets button switches to a quicker model. Answers come back noticeably sooner and cost four times the AI credits per message. The first time you turn it on you are asked to confirm, and after that it stays on until you switch it off, across sessions.
It earns its cost when you are working interactively and iterating on a question. For a scheduled or one-off report, leave it off.
Questions that work well
- Which five customers bought the most last month?
- Compare this month's sales with the same month last year.
- Which products have not sold at all in the last ninety days?
- Show revenue per branch as a bar chart.
- How many invoices are more than sixty days overdue, and who owes the most?
When an answer is not what you expected
Almost always the question was ambiguous in a way that is obvious to you and invisible in the data.
- Say which period you mean. Last month, this quarter, and year to date all have more than one reasonable reading.
- Say which number you mean. Sales might be gross, net of returns, or excluding tax, and your team already knows which one it uses.
- Ask Belta to show its work. It can return the rows behind a figure so you can see exactly what it counted.
- If the same misunderstanding keeps happening, fix it once for everyone in the Schema and Analytics prompts on the Databases tab.
Your conversations
Chats are saved automatically and are private to you. Nobody else in the workspace can read them, not even the Owner. From the history list you can rename a chat or delete it, and the search box matches chat names, which is a good reason to rename the ones you will want to find again.
New Chat starts a fresh context. Use it when you change subject, so an old thread does not colour a new question.