Bring conversation to any online research platform.
The inca SmartProbe API is a service that can be integrated with any online research platform to intelligently generate a follow-up (‘probing’) question based on the original open-ended question that a respondent was asked and on the respondent’s answer.
The Benefits
Deeper insight
Probes generated by inca SmartProbe encourage more specific and elaborated feedback and yield richer insights
Quality check
inca SmartProbe understands and analyzes participants' answers to open-ends, and can flag low-quality responses and participants
Rapport
inca SmartProbe shows the research participant that someone on the other side is listening and curious to know more
Personalization
Researchers still play a significant role in steering the conversation, instructing the AI to focus or avoid certain topics, interjecting with additional info as needed, or adopting different personalities to fully engage
No need to invest in dedicated R&D and additional infrastructure
We make it easy for you to super-power your platform with conversational capabilities!
The Technology
Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have revolutionized what is possible with conversational AI. inca SmartProbe API is built on top of LLM technology, but fine-tuned by a team of market researchers and natural language processing experts to ensure that you can get reliable, relevant follow-up questions to your open-ended survey responses.
Custom-trained NLP models include: Topic Detection, Emotion Detection and Mapping, Concept Matching, Text Sentiment Analysis, Keyword/Phrase Extraction, and more.
How it works
What’s the experience like for research participants?
No changes to the participant experience. They see a follow-up question after they have answered the open-ended question, in the same format as other open-ends. They do not leave the survey platform.
Where’s my data stored? Is my data shared with other API users?
inca stores your data on secure servers in the United States, for a period of at least 30 days or more depending on the data retention policy agreed to in the MSA. Data will also be stored on the survey/research platform you are integrating with, as with any other data collected via that platform. Data is not shared with other API users.
inca SmartProbe API Data Governance is available here.
Is my data used for any training purposes by inca | Nexxt Intelligence, and the Large Language Models (LLMs) behind inca?
inca | Nexxt Intelligence: It’s a discussion as part of the MSA - we encourage clients to allow us to use their data for training purposes to further enhance the general capabilities of inca’s. Clients may choose to opt-out.
LLMs: No, your data will not be used by any of the LLMs behind inca for training purposes.
What do I/the researcher get from the inca SmartProbe API, and where do I see the outputs?
The data will be stored along with the rest of your survey data from your survey/research platform. How the data will show depends entirely on your survey/research platform.
SmartProbe Demo
Test inca’s probing capabilities live!
To start, provide an open-ended question & a participant response.
Integration FAQ
Where does the integration happen?
On the survey platform you choose to add SmartProbe to your OEs. If you use multiple platforms for your surveys, each platform needs an integration.
How does the integration work?
Two ways to set it up, and the exact integration will depend on the survey platform you use.
Your programmer/scripter will need to add the code to each OE you want to use inca SmartProbe API with. However, once you have added the code for one OE, you can use the code as a template for other OEs.
Your programmer can set up a one-time integration which then allows the use of the conversational features with any OE without further scripting.
Is my data used for any training purposes by inca | Nexxt Intelligence, and the Large Language Models (LLMs) behind inca?
inca | Nexxt Intelligence: It’s a discussion as part of the MSA - we encourage clients to allow us to use their data for training purposes to further enhance the general capabilities of inca’s. Clients may choose to opt-out.
LLMs: No, your data will not be used by any of the LLMs behind inca for training purposes.
Who performs the integration?
Your scripting team/partner should perform the integration and answer your internal users’ questions. How to script on different survey platforms relies on the expertise of the scripting team working with the individual platforms. The inca team, however, have accumulated some code examples for some survey platforms that could be used for reference (included in the inca SmartProbe API Documentation, available by the end of Oct 2023)
Tips:
The key to successful integration is following the correct data structure
Save your code template
We don’t have a scripter/programmer on the team. Can we still complete the integration?
No, you need a scripter from your team or a scripting partner to perform the integration with your chosen survey platform.
FAQ
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1. The inca SmartProbe is proven to encourage survey participants to provide more thoughtful and elaborated answers. The richer OE results lead to more differentiates findings, which ultimately lead to more actionable insights. Contact us for a case study for more details. The API is a powerful add-on to any survey platform in order to enrich the quality of the conversations and maximize the value of OE questions in surveys.
2. The API provides a field, which indicates whether, for any respondent, the response given to an open ended question is considered of low quality, i.e. specifically, ‘non responsive’ or ‘uninformative’. For clients, this means that they can choose to use that information, for example to close surveys from respondents who give poor quality answers to the open ended questions.
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The inca SmartProbe API is a standalone service that allows inca’s conversational probing capabilities to be leveraged natively on other platforms: through a one-time technical integration, end-users can experience inca’s probe questions without ever leaving your platform. Platforms have full control over when the SmartProbe API is used, and what the UI looks like: for example, it could dynamically appear within a survey form, or it could even be used in a virtual reality environment by a virtual interviewer!
The inca conversational AI platform, on the other hand, is an end-to-end solution for conducting market research surveys and analysing the data using rich conversational AI capabilities. It is available as a DIY survey solution without any technical setup required. The inca conversational AI platform incorporates inca SmartProbing in addition to highly visual survey questions and projective techniques. The platform also allows the user to buy fieldwork sample, monitor fieldwork progress and analyse data live on the inca dashboard.
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Survey software providers and automated research platform providers can purchase an inca SmartProbe API licence from Nexxt Intelligence. Please contact us for more details.
If end users of research, either on the agency or client side, want to be able to use the inca SmartProbe API they will need to ask their platform provider(s) to integrate the inca SmartProbe API into their platform.
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inca SmartProbe API is currently available in 28 languages:
Arabic, Chinese* (Simplified and Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian/Bahasa, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Slovak, Swedish, Tagalog/Filipino, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese
Additional languages can be added with a lead time of 2 weeks**
*In certain countries where there are restrictive internet laws governing use of foreign AI it may not be possible to use inca SmartProbe API. China is the most notable example of this.
**inca SmartProbe API can only be generated for ‘high resource’ languages. In simple terms, a high resource language is one where a large amount of content is available on the internet. Please contact us if you would like to check inca SmartProbe API availability for specific languages.
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For each respondent, the inca SmartProbe API records 4 things:
- the response to the initial open ended question asked by the user
- the smart probe returned by inca’s AI in response to the respondents answer
- the response to the smart probe
- (in relevant cases) a ‘demerit’ flag which indicates if the respondent’s open ended answer was uninformative or nonresponsive to the question that was posed
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Clients have the choice of whatever analytical tools they wish to use for the open-ended data collected using the inca SmartProbe API.
Options include:
- manual coding of the open ended data
- using a text analytics tool they are already using to code the open ended data
- using Nexxt Intelligence’s inca AI coding tool. This uses AI to automatically code the open ended data but also puts the user in the loop so they can optimize the code frame produced by AI if they choose to do so. To use inca AI coding the user just needs to export the data from the survey platform and then upload as a CSV file into inca AI coding. See inca AI coding for more information.
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ChatGPT is an extremely powerful technology, but out of the box it won’t reliably ask the kinds of probing questions that a market researcher would want to ask. A user could tell ChatGPT to “act like a market researcher” and give it a few examples of good probing questions, but as with any professional market researcher, it needs more context, edge case handling, and expert guidance in order to reliably generate good questions. That’s why we’ve built the inca SmartProbe API on top of GPT technology, to give you confidence in high quality probing capability, and a robust API that’s easy to integrate.
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