Who can use this feature
👤 Available on Professional and Enterprise plans
Use our advanced search functionality to find insights, ask questions, and chat with Dovetail to discover . Quickly find exactly what you need with quick search, and utilize exact search matching and filters to refine your search results further with deep search.
Dovetail's search experience uses keyword search to display a list of results based on keywords. To start a quick search, click on the search bar or press ⌘
K
or Ctrl
K
on your keyboard and enter your query. Quick search will display Dovetail objects such as projects, folders, insights, and notes with matching titles wherever they are in your workspace.
Add quotation marks to your search terms to return exact results for that phrase. For example "keyword" to search for an exact term.
Without quotes, searches may also include results for similar terms (for instance, issues containing "test" may show up in a search for "testing").
💡 Tip: Longer queries will return more accurate search results. This means you can enter your search using natural language and in a way that makes sense to you. For example, “user problems with search interface”, “reasons for customer churn”, “why users are angry at <company>”.
Contextual chat is available in beta for workspaces on a paid plan. Admins can sign up to the beta and enable chat for their workspace in Settings.
Have a question about your customer data? Ask Dovetail. Chat allows anyone to query data in a conversational interface, powered by Claude 3.7 Sonnet. With Chat, anyone is empowered to access important customer knowledge. Here are just a few ways you can use it.
Use case | Question |
---|---|
Refine your approach | After reviewing a sales call transcript, ask Chat: "What questions could I have asked to understand the customer's needs better?" |
Uncover gaps | Within a research project, ask: "What adjacent topics are mentioned but not deeply explored in this data?" Use the insights to kickstart recruitment for your next study. |
Generate high-level reports | At the workspace level, ask: "Summarize the most common customer frustrations mentioned across all feedback projects this quarter" for a quick VoC report for leadership. |
Accelerate onboarding | New team members can click into different projects and use Chat to ask: "What was the primary goal of this discovery research?" or "Summarize the key recommendations from this project" to get up to speed faster. |
Chat works across your entire workspace and will auto-apply contextual filters based on where you are. This means you can drill down on a specific document or call, zoom out to all data across a Project or expand to ask questions to every piece of data in your workspace.
To do use Chat, click Chat
in the sidebar or use keyboard shortcut ⌘ J or Ctrl J
wherever you are in the workspace.
Next, interact with your data, asking questions like "How might I improve this conversation in the future?" if you're engaging with a customer or "What are key voice of customers for this month?" if you're looking to gain a holistic understanding of feedback.
From there, you can ask any follow up questions to help you discover more or capture your findings in an insight report, using Create insight
, that you can share with your stakeholders.
The power of magic search summaries isn't limited to users in a Dovetail workspace. With our Slack and Teams integrations, anyone in your organization can quickly ask a question about data stored in Dovetail to get the information they need to unblock their work.
With Ask add-on, anyone within a Slack or Teams instance can:
Engage with conversational AI to ask questions in Slack or Teams. For example, a user could ask, "What do new users struggle with during onboarding?", and receive a summary based on customer feedback, with citations to the source data.
Keep up-to-date with the latest insights via text or audio digests. These digests can be scheduled to proactively deliver important insights and information easy-to-consume format. These digests include summaries, key points, and (if delivered in audio format) clips of customer quotes.
At this time, Ask in Slack and Teams is available to purchase as an add-on for Enterprise workspaces. Learn more →
Anyone can gather evidence to inform a question they have about their customer's pain points, use cases, or problems with magic search summaries.
By default, our magic search summary uses a combined keyword and semantic search algorithm that aims to understand and engage with a search query in a way that mirrors how humans communicate. This means that if you enter a question for your search query, the magic summary will not only pull from keywords, but unearth data across Projects and Channels based on meaning, intent, and context.
Search summaries are automatically generated to include the most relevant results to your search query. You can also manually generate one by clicking Summarize
in the top right on the search page.
💡 Tip: Use filters to refine your magic summary. For example, you can choose to filter by a specific folder and date range to generate a magic summary that uses results matching those filters. This may be useful if you’re interested in focusing on specific team or project work.
Dovetail’s search supports filtering results by the following objects.
Title (text) – The plain title of the project, note, tag, or insight.
Content (text) – The content of the note, tag, insight, or highlight.
Note (multi select) – A specific note.
Tag (multi select) – A specific tag.
Project (multi select) – A specific project.
Folder (multi select) – A specific folder.
Note board (multi select) – A specific note board.
Note group (multi select) – A specific note group.
Tag board (multi select) – A specific tag board.
Tag group (multi select) – A specific tag group.
Created (date) – When the object was created.
Updated (date) – When the object was last updated.
Please note that not every filter listed will be available when looking at specific objects in search. For example, you won’t be able to filter by 'published’ when looking at notes only as you are unable to publish notes.
By default, results are sorted by Relevance
, but this can be changed to their Created
or Updated
date or alphabetically by Name
by adjusting the sorting filter at the left of the filter bar.
No, we use a generic AI model and don’t feed it any training data to ensure user data is kept private.
At a high level, search pulls what is determined as most relevant to the query. Due to this, insights and highlights are more likely to "rank" higher in the results as the data on these objects are more refined and targeted.
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Last updated 22 April 2025
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