AI-moderated studies give you the best of both worlds: the convenience and scale of unmoderated research with the rich, detailed insights you'd get from live interviews. Our AI-Moderator conducts intelligent user research sessions by asking relevant follow-up questions based on your learning goals and participant responses.
AI-moderated studies are only available on Enterprise plans.
In this article:
- Create an AI-moderated study
- Analysis and reporting
- How participants interact with the AI-Moderator
- Best practices
- Reporting Issues
Create an AI-moderated study
Create your study
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Create a new study and select AI-moderated
- Choose between Guided Setup to follow along with a template or Custom Setup to start building your study from scratch.
- Set language preferences for both speaker, the way the AI-moderator interacts with participants, and analysis, the way our AI analyzes the recording of the study. You can select multiple languages, and different languages for both speaker and analysis.
Currently supported languages are English, Chinese (Mandarin Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian & European), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Sweden, Thai, Turkish.
Set up your goals
- Describe your study by letting the builder know what insights you’d like to gather or select a template to generate a prompt for you.
- Add context about your company or product, and hypotheses or open questions to create a more personalized experience during the conversation. You can paste publicly accessible websites for our builder to scrape information from or simply type in the name of your Company for our AI Search to pull in information.
- When using AI Search, be sure to review information for accuracy and condense information as needed.
- Maze uses best research practices to help you set up your study. The system creates structured research objectives based on your inputs. Review these and edit, delete, or add custom goals as needed.
Structure your study
After reviewing your study goals, hit Next to then view a high level overview of your study plan.
- Under Plan, you can edit the introduction and closing sections as well as each individual goal. The Context section allows you to edit the context settings that were setup in the previous window.
- Set conversation depth for each goal to determine how long you’d like the AI-Moderator to stay on a particular topic:
- Shallow (~3 minutes)
- Moderate (5 minutes)
- Deep (8 minutes)
- Add questions you’d like the AI-Moderator to ask manually or generate questions using AI.
Once you’ve edited your interview plan, you can preview your study before sharing it live by clicking the ▷ Start Preview button in the center of the preview window. You can also preview your study in a separate tab by clicking the Preview button from the top right corner of the page.
Share your study
Now that your AI-moderated study is built, you can share it with your own participants or recruit through our panel integration with Prolific.
Learn more about plans & pricing.
Analysis and reporting
Each AI-moderated session automatically generates a comprehensive analysis package including AI summaries, editable transcripts with speaker separation, and timestamped highlights of key moments.
You can easily navigate between recordings and transcripts, organize insights by themes, and share important findings as clips or pinned highlights for your team.
Learn more about AI-Moderated Study results
Thematic analysis
Ready to dive deeper into cross-session insights? Learn more about our thematic analysis feature that automatically identifies patterns across all your participants and generates comprehensive theme-based reports with sentiment analysis and customizable findings.
Learn more about using thematic analysis to generate themes in your study
How participants interact with the AI-Moderator
Once you've started your recruitment, participants will join a video call where an AI-moderator will lead the conversation, asking questions based on the parameters you’ve set up (learning goals, extra context, etc).
It will display different states (waiting, listening, thinking, or ready to interrupt) to make it easier for conversation to flow, allowing participants to speak naturally and interrupt when needed.
The AI-Moderator will pick up key elements during the conversation to generate relevant follow-up questions in real-time, digging into topics based on the conversation depth you've set up. They understand whole sentences, opinions and experiences, as well as tonal shifts, and can react accordingly during the conversation.
Best practices
Getting great results with the AI-Moderator is all about setting it up for success. Think of the AI as a research assistant who's really good at following up on interesting topics, but needs you to point it in the right direction first.
Here are a few key suggestions that'll help you get the most out of your AI-moderated sessions:
- Give the AI context so it can ask the most relevant follow-up questions.
- Write concise and clear learning goals and questions, then trust the AI to ask follow-up questions. Use plain language and avoid writing overly complex or conditional questions.
- Keep the learning goals of the study top of mind as they will define what results you get.
- Consider sharing your study with a few participants or internally first to validate that the conversation matches your needs. Share your study more widely once you’re confident it’s complete.
Reporting Issues
If you run into any issues with AI-Moderator functionality, conversation quality, or technical issues, please contact our Support team.
You'll also receive feedback forms after sessions where you can share detailed feedback about your experience.