🚀 New as of July 2025 🚀
Outset now supports research teams who run their own interviews outside the platform. With the new human-moderated upload feature, you can upload video or audio recordings of interviews you’ve conducted and use Outset’s analysis tools to synthesize findings across conversations. This feature is currently in private beta and available by request.
1. What is human-moderated upload?
This feature allows you to upload recorded interviews that were led by a person, rather than Outset’s AI moderator. You’ll get the same transcript and insights experience as AI-moderated interviews, including:
Automatic transcription
Interview summaries
Insights dashboards and custom reporting
The ability to bookmark clips and create highlight reels
No need to upload a discussion guide - Outset infers key topics from the conversation automatically.
2. Supported formats and file types
You can upload both MP4 files (e.g, Zoom recordings downloaded locally) or MP3 files (audio/ voice only)
The system works with both video and audio-only recordings. It can distinguish between interviewer and respondent voices for two-person conversations.
There is no limit on the number of uploads or the length of recordings
3. Upload process and metadata
To get started:
Create a new project and choose "Research upload" as the type
Create a study within that project
Upload video/audio files - you can upload multiple files at once (no need to do them one-by-one)
You don’t need to upload metadata up front. After upload, you can add metadata like participant name, gender, or segment tags to help filter and analyze your data later.
4. How analysis works
Once uploaded, Outset transcribes each interview and applies its transcript-wide analysis. You’ll get:
Automatic extraction of key questions and themes
Insights grouped by topic
The ability to run custom reports on specific themes
Human-moderated studies do not rely on a discussion guide. Instead, the system identifies themes directly from the conversation content.
5. Minimums, limits, and what's not supported
You must upload at least 5 interviews for analysis to work properly and graphs to generate on the Insights page
Focus groups (more than two speakers) are not supported yet
Interviews do not need to include the same questions for all participants, but the interviews should thematically focus on the same topics generally for best results
At this time, human-led and AI-led interviews live in separate projects and can’t be merged into a single analysis (read more below)
6. Comparing with AI-moderated interviews
Human-moderated uploads produce similar insights dashboards to AI interviews. The key difference is that instead of being structured around a guide, themes are derived from conversation content.
Sometimes, you may have a project where you want to analyze both human-led and AI-led interviews.
To compare AI and human interviews:
Set up separate projects - one for AI-led, one for human-led (research import)
Use the "chat with your data" feature to test hypotheses within each project
To get more of an apples to apples comparison, run a transcript-wide custom report on both studies using the same set of questions
7. Getting access
Human-moderated upload is in private beta. To get access, reach out to your Outset Customer Success Manager or email [email protected]. We’re currently enabling this feature for select teams and actively gathering feedback.