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The AI interviewer is the conversational moderator that runs your study: it asks your questions, listens, probes with follow-ups, and keeps the conversation on track. Everything about its behavior is configurable in Settings → AI Interviewer.
The AI Interviewer tab is hidden for studies using the Survey engine, since surveys don’t have conversational questions.

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Interviewer mode

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Personality & guidelines

  • Description (up to 900 characters) — the interviewer’s persona: tone, role, and style. For example, a warm UX researcher, or a neutral market-research moderator.
  • Guidelines (up to 3,000 characters) — behavioral rules for the whole interview. When set, your guidelines replace Versive’s defaults, so include everything you care about (probing style, what to avoid, how to handle off-topic answers).

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Memory (Beta)

Turn on Memory to let the interviewer learn from completed interviews in the same study and ask sharper, more informed follow-up questions as responses accumulate. After each completed live interview, Versive extracts small observations — emerging findings, follow-up questions that worked, threads participants left open — and folds them into a per-study briefing. In later interviews, the interviewer uses that briefing to pursue unresolved threads, probe findings that need confirmation, reuse probes that landed, and skip ground that’s already well covered. Good to know:
  • Off by default; toggle it in Settings → AI Interviewer.
  • Only completed live interviews contribute — simulated interviews don’t feed memory.
  • Findings are treated carefully: a pattern needs multiple independent confirmations before the interviewer treats it as established, and when participants disagree, the interviewer probes to resolve the disagreement rather than assuming.
  • The interviewer never reveals or attributes what earlier participants said — memory shapes which questions get asked, not what gets shared.

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Question rephrasing

By default the AI may rephrase the next question so it flows naturally from the conversation (“You mentioned onboarding was confusing — walk me through what happened when…”). You can:
  • Turn rephrasing off entirely if exact wording matters (e.g. standardized instruments).
  • Add rephrasing instructions (up to 300 characters) to constrain how questions may be reworded.

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Follow-ups

Follow-up behavior is configured per question — see the AI Question settings for follow-up limits, instructions, and duration targets.

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Transcription keywords

Under Advanced → Keywords, add domain-specific terms — company names, product names, industry jargon — to improve voice transcription accuracy.

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Voice settings

For realtime voice-to-voice studies, tune the silence threshold (0.5–5 seconds, default 1.5) that controls how long the AI waits after the participant stops speaking before responding.