AI Probing in Diary & Mobile Ethnography projects adds depth to your research without extra effort. It helps capture richer participant responses across task types, including open-ended text, audio, video, photo uploads, mobile screen recording, and follow-up text boxes for single choice, multiple choice, and range questions.
AI Probing is also compatible with single choice, range, matrix, and multiple-choice questions, even when no open-ended add-on is used. However, we rarely recommend adding AI probes to these types of questions.
When creating a new Diary & Mobile Ethnography project, you’ll see two new setup fields, now available in all project languages. These fields help the AI better understand your study and generate stronger participant probes. Tooltips are included beside each field for guidance.
Please note: AI probes are a helpful way for the AI moderator to ask follow‑up questions, but they are not perfect. Because they are generated by AI, occasional mistakes or irrelevant prompts can occur. Participants may also choose not to respond to every probe, and that variability should be expected.
We recommend using AI probes sparingly, ideally on only a couple of tasks within a project. When they are overused, participants report frustration, longer completion times, and a sense that the project requires more effort than originally communicated.
Below is an example of these fields filled out for an Energy Drink project.
Note: When completing the Target Audience/Study Goal fields for projects in languages other than English, you may enter your responses in either English or the project’s language.
New Project Screen
When setting up tasks for your project, if the question type supports AI probing, you will see the following option:
Upon clicking this box, you will see two additional fields, each accompanied by tooltips explaining their purpose. The AI will use the AI Prompt field to ask follow-up questions and will automatically receive the task question and the respondent’s answer.
Example AI Prompt:
- Number of Follow Ups: This feature lets you choose the number of follow-up AI probes our AI agent, Avery Quinn, will send. For example, if you set it to 2, once a participant submits an entry to your task, they will receive a follow-up question. After they respond, they will receive a second follow-up immediately.
- AI Prompt: The initial section of this field contains our default prompt, which you can customize if you prefer to use a different prompt. If you’re working on a project in a language other than English, you can either keep the prompt in English or translate it into the project’s language. The prompt is: You are a qualitative researcher use the laddering technique and response to the question.
If you you wish to change your target audience and project goals, you can do so by editing this field. If you plan to set AI probes for additional tasks and are editing your project goals or target audience, it would be more efficient to navigate to Admin > Project Settings to update these settings. This ensures that each time you turn on AI probes for a new task, the updated information from the project settings will automatically be applied.
Note: If you have the ‘Include AI Follow Up Probing Questions’ option checked and save the task, any subsequent changes to the project settings will only be applied to new tasks where AI Probes are enabled. Tasks that already have this feature activated will continue to use the information you initially saved in the box.
Example of the AI in Use:
Below is the conversation the participant had with the AI, stored in the Probes tab within the participant’s entry. The top post shows Dave Watkins’ response to the original task. The entry circled in red is the AI’s follow-up question to Dave, and the third entry is Dave’s reply to the AI.
Note: Video files exceeding 7 minutes are considered non-traditional in EthOS. If a file surpasses this limit, AI probing will not be executed for that entry.
For context, the participant’s task was an open-ended question asking: When do you normally consume energy drinks? Is there a specific time of day or day of the week? Please explain.
The participant Dave W answered this open end task with: So I tend to drink energy drinks everyday. I usually drink one-two during the day time, sort of between the hours of 9am till 3pm, this would usually be on a break at work. In the late afternoon/evening I will normally drink another two energy drinks to help push me through the later stages of the day, finishing up my parental responsibilities and then any work related tasks I have to get done.
Please note: The AI probe will not ask specific, predetermined questions. In the AI probe box, you cannot instruct it to ask exact questions. If you need to ask particular questions, please use a manual probe or create a task that contains the exact wording you want.