Customer conversations are a goldmine of information, but they are often scattered across different platforms—Zoom cloud recordings, shared drives, and individual calendars. The process of gathering these files, manually transcribing them, and making sense of themes is incredibly time-consuming and creates a significant barrier before analysis can even begin. With Dovetail, you can centralize related sets of data-rich sources like customer interviews, usability tests, or sales calls an analyze your project. In this lesson, you will learn how work hand-in-hand with AI to centralize, analyze, and make sense of customer interviews and calls.

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Create a project and connect your tools

Dovetail makes it easy to bring your recordings (audio or video) of customer interviews, calls, and usability tests into your project in one of two ways:

Upload audio or video files manually

Sync recordings from your calendar events

The calendar automated workflow eliminates hours of low-value, administrative work. By removing the friction of gathering and transcribing data, it empowers your team to move directly to the high-value task of analysis. You start with a clean, organized, and searchable foundation, turning a tedious prerequisite into a seamless part of your research operations.
Once uploaded, Dovetail will automatically transcribe and summarize your calls. Our powerful transcription engine supports multiple languages and even identifies different speakers.

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Use AI to guide your focus

Analyzing hours of conversation can be daunting. Dovetail’s AI gives you a powerful head start at both a granular and project-wide level.

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Get an instant overview with AI summaries

When a new recording is imported into a project, Dovetail automatically generates a summary. This turns an hour of conversation into clear, actionable takeaways so you and your team can quickly understand what’s important. To gain a new perspective, you can refine this summary using AI summaries. Select from different prompts to tailor the output, such as:
  • Chronologically: See how the conversation unfolded chronologically.
  • Summary: Get a high-level list of the most important points.
  • Topics: Understand the recurring topics from the conversation.
A single conversation contains different value for different team members. A generic summary might be too high-level for a researcher, while lacking the specific action items a sales team needs. Furthermore, a summary without direct links to the evidence is just a claim; verifying it requires manually scrubbing through the original recording, which erodes trust and efficiency. Let’s use the Customer call prompt as an example. By selecting this and regenerating, we get an updated summary structured perfectly for post-call analysis. It provides:
  • A brief recap of the call
  • Clear action items for your team
  • The customer’s key pain points
  • The customer’s underlying needs
  • Specific feature requests
  • Potential opportunities for your team
Best of all, this enhanced summary is complete with citations that link directly to the specific quotes in the transcript, helping you take action faster—with clarity and confidence.

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Ask questions across your project

Identifying a pattern in one interview is easy. Identifying a recurring theme across 10, 20, or 50 interviews is one of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of qualitative analysis. This synthesis is often a manual process involving a high degree of cognitive load. Dovetail’s Chat feature allows you to query your entire project dataset at any level. You can ask complex questions to compare, contrast, and summarize findings across all interviews at once.
For example, you could ask, “What are the biggest pain points mentioned across all these interviews?” Dovetail will search through all your transcripts to find the answer, citing key moments from specific sources.
Instead of you manually hunting for patterns, the AI scans everything to find connections and supporting evidence for you. It dramatically accelerates the journey from individual observations to robust, evidence-backed themes, allowing you to answer your biggest research questions in minutes, not days.

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Layering in hands-on analysis

While AI is excellent at identifying patterns and summarizing content, it can miss the subtle cues of human conversation—sarcasm, hesitation, enthusiasm, or the unspoken meaning behind a quote. If you want to look deeper and manually explore the nuances of your customer interviews and calls using Dovetail’s core analysis features. As you read through a transcript, use your cursor to select your “golden moments”—the most insightful, impactful, and representative quotes from your customers. These are your highlights. Creating a highlight pulls that piece of evidence out so you can start building the evidence base you’ll need to create compelling, data-backed insights for your stakeholders.
  • To create a highlight, select a section of text in a note and select Highlight from the action menu.
If you’re a power user, you can quickly create highlights by selecting a section of text and then pressing Tab on your keyboard to cycle through the action menu.
This hybrid model gives you the best of both worlds: the speed and scale of AI and the depth and nuance of the human mind. Highlighting allows you to deliberately curate your evidence, building a rich, compelling narrative that resonates with stakeholders because it’s backed by both machine-driven patterns and human-validated insights. You’ve now learned how to transform the daunting task of analyzing hours of customer calls into a streamlined, powerful workflow. By moving from scattered recordings and manual transcription to a centralized, AI-assisted process, you can dramatically accelerate your path to understanding.
Now it’s time to get started! Create a new project and either connect your calendar to automatically import new recordings or manually upload one recent customer interview from your computer or cloud drive.Create a new project →