Why Voicepanel? When working at Google, my co-founder John was tasked with gathering fresh information from millions of local businesses. His team tried several approaches to this problem over the years, but found that the most effective method by far was to use an automated voice bot (powered by the Google Assistant) that would call businesses and ask basic questions like: “Are you open this Sunday?”

With the recent advancement of LLMs and voice synthesis, John and I realized that this insight could be applied to the problem of gathering feedback. John and I both worked at Optimizely where we saw the benefits of combining quantitative data from things like A/B tests & surveys with qualitative data like user interviews. However, we never felt like there were good tools at the intersection of these two worlds.

When looking at the options for gathering feedback or doing market research, some common methods are to either: (1) setup a survey or (2) conduct interviews. However, both methods have some drawbacks.

Surveys are most useful when you can easily categorize the answer space in a way that’s useful and want to quantify the results (ex: “Which do you prefer?”). They are also easy to send out to a lot of people at once. Surveys don’t do as well when too many responses land in the “Other” category or you are seeking open-ended qualitative responses to not only explore a new answer space but also get at the underlying “why” behind a particular answer.

Interviews on the other hand are perfect for open-ended questions (ex: “Interesting. Why do you feel that way?”), sharing designs and prototypes, and exploring the possible answer space. However, interviews don’t scale well. Scheduling interviews takes time, participants may not show up, conducting the interview in a consistent and unbiased manner takes lots of diligence and synthesizing the output can take weeks of manual effort to categorize and quantify the data.

That’s why we are building Voicepanel. With the advent of LLMs and voice synthesis, we think this is a great time to introduce a new medium for gathering feedback that can combine the scalability and quantitative nature of a survey with the depth of a qualitative open-ended interview. We are excited to see what our users do with Voicepanel and look forward to everyone getting deeper, more insightful quantifiable feedback :)