What are AI moderated studies?

AI moderated studies are the fastest way to get interview-depth insights at scale. This study type lets an AI moderator conduct conversational sessions with participants on your behalf, dynamically guiding them through your topics, asking for clarification, and probing deeper based on their responses. Want to understand how people think about a concept or experience, but don't have time to run dozens of one-on-one interviews? Try an AI moderated study.

In Dscout, some key AI moderated study features include:

An adaptive AI moderator: Define your research objectives and questions, and the AI moderator leads each session by asking dynamic follow-ups to dig deeper and gather the insights you need. No two sessions are exactly alike, but your research objectives stay consistent.
Talk out loud and Task questions: Combine open-ended Talk out loud questions, website or prototype Task questions, and closed-ended Multiple choice and Scale questions in a single session. For more information, see Question types in AI moderated studies.
Continuous recording and transcription: Each participant's screen, webcam, and audio are recorded and transcribed for the entire session, so you get a full session recording alongside AI-generated summaries and themes.
Research at scale, in any language: Run sessions asynchronously across time zones, and let participants respond in one of 25+ supported languages. Responses are translated back to English for analysis. For more information, see Manage language of an AI moderated study.

Note: AI moderated studies are desktop-only. Participants must join from a desktop or laptop computer using the Chrome browser—they can't complete a session on a mobile device.

Recruitment options

To find participants for an AI moderated study, you can:

Add participants from an existing Dscout screener.
Auto-recruit from Dscout's Scout Panel.
Auto-recruit from Dscout's Partner Panels.
Invite your own participants using a share link.
Add participants from Private Panels.

For more information, see Recruitment options in an AI moderated study.

AI moderated studies vs. interview studies

Tip: Already conducted a moderated interview study? You can scale it to hear from even more participants with an AI moderated study. Turn the questions you already asked yourself into an unmoderated study. For more information, see Scale an interview study with AI moderator.

AI moderated studies are ideal when you want to:

Collect interview-depth responses from a large number of participants without scheduling one-on-one sessions.
Explore concepts, experiences, or attitudes through open-ended conversation at scale.
Run research asynchronously across time zones and outside business hours.
Reduce the time and effort of manual moderation while still capturing rich, qualitative data.

However, you might be wondering whether to use an AI moderated study or an interview study. To help, here's a comparison of each study type:

Capability

AI moderated study

Interview study

Moderation

An AI moderator conducts every session automatically

A live human moderator runs each session

Scheduling

Participants complete sessions on their own time

Sessions are individually scheduled

Question types

Talk out loud, Task, Multiple choice, and Scale

Open-ended conversation with live follow-ups

Follow-up questions

AI-generated follow-ups based on participant responses

The moderator asks follow-ups in real time

Session recording

Automatic recording and transcription

Observers

Not applicable

Invite hidden stakeholders to watch live

Best for

Depth at scale

Deep, nuanced one-on-one exploration

For more information on interview studies, see What are interview studies in Dscout? Or if neither of these seems to be the right fit, read more about our other study types in the Dscout quickstart guide.