Introducing a new way to tell stories – with video and transcription

Stories help people communicate ideas and share experiences. Impactful researchers not only have to be skilled facilitators and analysts but expert storytellers too. However, as researchers, we know it’s an ongoing struggle to get our teams and stakeholders to engage with lengthy research reports or raw data.

Video is engaging, memorable, and inspirational. It’s the most impactful medium for compelling storytelling and effective communication. Video helps to build empathy in teams, especially in usability testing. There’s no better way for your team to feel affinity for an end-user or a customer than seeing their pain points first hand.

Today, we’re announcing a huge evolution in Dovetail with video highlights, a powerful new way to share research stories about your users and develop a repository of searchable audio and video clips. We’ve been working on this feature for a while, and we’re very excited to share it with you today.

With Dovetail, go from a recording to tagged, searchable video clips in a matter of minutes, with accurate transcription and powerful tagging features. Let your users speak for themselves with engaging and memorable video highlights that inspire action from your team, and bring your research insights to life.

Check out our new product tour, or read on for a deep dive walkthrough.

Video player with highlight timeline visible.

Built-in, accurate transcription

Bring your own recordings from the tools you already use, like Zoom, Google Meet, Lookback, or UserTesting. Just upload your video (or audio file) and transcribe it in one click. We’ll do all the heavy lifting. When your transcript is ready, you can make edits inline, click to seek, name and change speakers, split monologues, and much more. Transcripts in Dovetail are tightly integrated into the existing editor experience you know and love, so features like real-time collaborative editing and undo / redo just work.

We know how important accurate transcriptions are for research. Your time should be spent actually doing research and not correcting unreliable transcripts. The transcription speech engine we use is trained on 10,000+ hours of human-transcribed content across a diversity of topics, industries, and accents. Our speech recognition model consistently reports some of the lowest word error rates (WER) when compared to other speech recognition models, making our transcripts some of the most reliable anywhere.

Transcript with picture-in-picture player visible.

Create video highlights

Built on Dovetail’s existing powerful data analysis and tagging features, simply select text and tag your transcript to create a set of short audio or video clips across all of your interviews, usability tests, and more.

As you create your highlights, you’ll capture key moments in the recording. Navigate to a tag to see trimmed and edited moments for your highlights, without the need for complex video editing software. There’s no need to change how you currently use Dovetail. Just do your analysis and the video magic will happen in the background as you work.

Video highlights and transcription takes Dovetail closer towards our vision of being the world-class data analysis platform for user researchers. Throughout 2020 we’ll continue to improve our platform with new ways to speed up analysis through automation, and better segmentation and charts to help you uncover patterns across your research data. This will make the features we’re announcing today even more powerful.

Video and audio transcription with highlights takes analysis in Dovetail to the next level.

Bring your research to life

We’re making it easy for you to bring your research ‘to life’ to drive meaningful change and inspire better decision making. With video highlights, it becomes effortless to draw attention to key moments in your interviews and usability tests. Dovetail’s free, unlimited viewer accounts allow you to invite your entire team to engage with what your customers are saying, and build empathy that inspires change.

Transform your long .mp4 and .mov recordings, scattered across Google Drive and Dropbox, into a fully searchable research repository. Centralize your recordings, and search inside of your video files to pinpoint the exact moment a phrase or keyword is mentioned. With video highlights in Dovetail, anyone in your organization can now listen to what your customers are saying, and jump to the context in which they said it.

Video highlights in search results.

Start using it today

Video analysis and transcription is entirely free to use during the beta period. After the beta, all plans will come with free included transcription minutes, with the option to purchase additional minutes if you’re doing a lot of research.

We’re incredibly excited about what we’ve built and we can’t wait to see the impact video highlights and transcription has in your team and organization!

Browse the product tour to learn more, and get in touch if you have any questions we can help answer.