AI Moderator FAQs: Real Questions from Real Researchers
Over the past few months, our team has answered hundreds of questions about Voxpopme’s AI Moderator during real, live conversations with insight leaders like you. We’ve had 276 calls with research professionals around the world, exploring everything from “How does AI Moderation actually probe?” to “Can I show stimulus mid-interview?”
This post distills those conversations into the most asked—and most important—questions, so you can see exactly what the AI Moderator does, how it works, and why it’s worth joining our free pilot program to try this new video research methodology.
1. What exactly is the AI Moderator?
Voxpopme’s AI Moderator is a voice-based research moderator that runs live, one-on-one video interviews with consumers—following your discussion guide, probing naturally, and summarizing everything for you. It’s like a super-fast, super-consistent moderator who never gets tired. Now you can run interviews without the hassle of scheduling and hosting every call.
And here’s the thing: we’ve poured hundreds of engineering hours into building it with researchers, for researchers. Every part of it was designed in collaboration with real Voxpopme users to make sure it solves actual research problems—not just theoretical ones.
Q: “So this is a real-time conversation? Not just a chatbot?”
A: Yep. Participants speak to the AI Moderator just like they would with a human. It listens, responds, and follows up based on their answers.
One researcher told us:
“That’s so cool. We could have 20 or 30 interviews done in days instead of weeks—no need to schedule around a human moderator.”
👉 Claim your free AI Moderator pilot
2. How does the AI Moderator handle short or vague answers?
We’ve all had those participants who give one-word answers. The AI Moderator knows when someone’s being brief—and nudges them for more detail.
Q: “What if people only give one-word answers?”
A: The AI politely prompts them to expand, using the context of your question to keep it relevant.
You can even prep the moderator with prompting depth and keyword guidance so it knows how deep to dive. And here’s a fascinating trend:
“People are often more comfortable talking to an AI Moderator than a human—especially on sensitive topics—because they feel less judged.”
3. Can the AI Moderator show stimuli during interviews?
Yes. You can share concepts, text, and product images—whatever you’d like respondents to react to—right inside the interview.
Q: “By ‘stimulus,’ do you mean I can show something in real time?”
A: Exactly. The AI Moderator presents the stimulus and then asks your follow-up questions.
Worth noting: At the time of writing, all Stimuli are image based.
4. How do I set up an AI Moderator project?
You can launch an AI Moderator interview in less than 10 minutes. It’s as easy as building a quantitative survey, but this time you’ll get the richness of video on the back-end. All you’ll need to do is:
- Add a simple research objective
- AI can write your discussion guide for you (or upload your own)
- Choose any screeners and layer in quant questions
- Choose an audience from Voxpopme’s global panel, to your own.
- Hit launch and sit back while AI does the moderating.
The result:
- No calendar juggling: Participants join when it’s convenient for them.
- No manual moderation: The AI handles the conversation naturally.
- No analysis delays: Instant video analysis and insights, ready to share.
Need to see it to believe it? Try AI Moderator for free
5. What outputs do I get from AI Moderator interviews?
This is where the magic happens. Every AI Moderator interview is recorded, transcribed and summarized with AI. So you get the raw emotion of the video interview, turned into digestible data. You can:
- Dive deep into individual videos
- Explore entire sets of videos all at one time using AI analysis
- Generate AI reports that are shareable with your business
- Create showreels with your findings that you can distribute with ease
The beauty of this is that every single insight you share can be backed up by real video evidence that you’ve collected from real people—meaning you can trust in AI’s analysis.
Q: “Will I get clips I can share with my team?”
A: Absolutely. You can pull highlights by keyword, theme, or sentiment.
6. Who can I reach with the AI Moderator?
You can tap into Voxpopme’s global participant network, connect a third-party panel, or invite your own recruits via a shareable link.
Q: “Do I have to use your panel?”
A: Not at all—you can bring your own audience.
The AI Moderator is already in use by research teams in the US, UK, Australia, and across Europe.
7. What languages does AI Moderator support?
Currently, the AI Moderator supports English-only live interviews, but our multilingual AI Moderator is in the works.
8. How advanced is the AI Moderator’s probing logic?
It’s not just keyword-matching—it understands the intent of your guide and the nuance of responses. You can set the depth of probing, create trigger words for the AI Moderator to listen for, and even provide more context around what specifically the AI Moderator should focus on for each question.
Q: “Can I control the depth of questions, and how much digging the AI Moderator does”
A: Yes—you can dial the level of probing up and down from none to deep-dive, ensuring the moderator meets your needs.
One client summed it up:
“It doesn’t just move on—it knows when to stay with a topic until it gets a full answer.”
9. How fast is AI Moderator fieldwork?
Many interviews are completed the same day as launch, especially with faster audiences like Gen Z. We like to advise 1-3 days to be on the safe side, but the days of waiting weeks and months for video feedback are long gone.
Q: “What’s the turnaround time?”
A: From launch to results, it can be hours.
💡 Join our AI Moderator pilot program
10. What’s included in the AI Moderator pilot?
Our free pilot gives you up to 10 AI-moderated interviews, plus 30 days to explore your results.
Here’s how it works:
- Book a meeting with our team to pick a simple study idea.
- Build your study & audience with our help.
- Launch AI Moderator to talk to real people.
- Review insights with instant analysis and shareable clips.
11. Are there any limitations with AI Moderator?
While it’s powerful, the AI Moderator works best with a clear, well-structured guide. Some niche audiences may take longer to reach, and a strong internet connection is essential.
Why researchers join the AI Moderator pilot
- “It frees me up to focus on analysis instead of chasing scheduling emails.”
- “We can run more interviews without adding or running over budget.”
- “We’ve seen the same quality we’d expect from a human moderator, but at scale and at the speed of quant.”
🎯 Claim your free AI Moderator pilot today
Final thought from Team Voxpopme: Whether you’re testing creative, exploring new product concepts, or gathering customer stories, we’ve built the AI Moderator to help you move faster without losing the human touch. And every smooth, instant conversation you see? That’s the result of hundreds of hours of engineering work, fine-tuning it with real researchers for real research.
The pilot’s free—so there’s nothing to lose and plenty of insights to gain. Start yours today by booking an AI Moderator kick-off call.
