Import data to projects

In Dovetail, research data is stored in ‘notes’. Notes can contain text, images, audio, video, tables, a transcript from an audio or video file, and more. Notes are flexible and can support a wide variety of research methodologies and data formats including:

• Raw notes taken during a customer interview.

• Video or audio from interviews, usability test, sales call, or product demo.

• Survey responses or qualitative customer feedback imported via a spreadsheet.

By housing data in notes, you can capture key moments by highlighting and tagging this content. For example, for any video or audio content uploaded into a note can be transcribed by an advanced AI-powered speech engine. From there, you can create highlights to turn your raw recording into tagged, searchable audio and video clips.

Managers and contributors can import data into a project using the file picker, or using one of our integrations including Google Drive, Zoom, or OneDrive.

We currently support the following file types for projects:

• Video and audio files: Zoom cloud recordings, Google Meet recordings, Teams cloud recordings,

• Documents: PDFs (.pdf), Microsoft Word documents (.docx), Microsoft Powerpoint files (.pptx), Keynote presentations (.key), Apple Pages (.pages), Google cloud documents (sheet, slide or drawing), OneDrive documents (PDF, Word documents, Excel sheets and Powerpoint).

For import, you can select one or many files at a time. When importing files in bulk, these will be housed as individual data points in the same project.

Using Zapier and our Google Calendar and Outlook Calendar integrations, you can import data into your project automatically.

With Zapier, you can import text-based data from other apps. For example, you could create notes from SurveyMonkey responses, connect an NPS tool like Delighted or AskNicely, or add people to your database via a Google Form. To view what apps you can use via Zapier, please view our Zapier directory.

For automatically importing video recordings using our calendar integrations, you must be using Zoom. For example:

• If you are working with Zoom and Google Calendar, set up both integrations in your account.

• If you are working with Zoom and Outlook Calendar, set up both integrations in your account.

When you open your data, you'll see its body, the editor toolbar at the top, and a sidebar with icons to the right. In the sidebar, this is where you'll find and quickly navigate to your note's magic summary, highlights, tags, fields, and comments.

You can also collapse the sidebar from view. To do this, hover over the border and click the arrow to Hide sidebar. The sidebar can be re-opened at any time with the same action.

When you upload a video or audio file, we’ll automatically detect the language and generate a transcript and summary of your data.

Set a default transcription language

Workspace admins can set a default transcription language for your entire workspace, and users with edit access to a project can set a default language for that project only. This is great if your video and audio files are always in the same language, or if your language isn't supported for auto-detect.

• To set the default workspace transcription language, workspace admins will need to navigate to Settings → Transcription → Workspace transcription language.

• To set a default transcription language at the project level, open that project’s settings and navigate to Transcription → Project transcription language.

If you’ve already uploaded and transcribed a file and need to change the transcription language, open the note with the incorrect transcription and navigate to Transcription options (•••) → Language → select the correct language from the dropdown menu → Regenerate. Here, you can also choose to save this language for future uploads to this project, which will set the project’s default transcription language.

You can transcribe conversations in 41 languages and receive a full native-language transcript back. Please find a full list of supported languages below.

Unsupported languages for auto-detect

Unfortunately, Dovetail cannot automatically detect every language that we currently support at this time. If the spoken language cannot be detected, a transcript will still be generated; however, it will not be accurate.

Please refer to the list of unsupported languages below before using auto-detect.

To improve the accuracy of transcripts, you can submit a list of custom words or phrases that are not found in a dictionary (for example, company names or industry jargon) before starting a transcription.

• To do this, upload your file, select Begin, and navigate to Custom vocabulary.

• From there, enter words or phrases into the textbox and select Start transcription when complete.

Share a custom vocabulary across the workspace

To avoid entering terms every time before a transcription, workspace admins can save a global list of up to 100 words or phrases by navigating to Settings → Transcription → Workspace custom vocabulary. This will apply to all transcripts users create across all projects.

For when you need human-level accuracy with your transcripts or to analyze conversations in a language that we don't yet support – we've also added the option to bring your own transcript (in the form of a caption file).

We support importing any WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) caption file. When you upload a .vtt caption file, we'll use the caption timestamps to sync with your video or audio file playback.

• To import your own transcript, click ••• (Actions) below a video or audio file → Click Upload transcript → Select a compatible .vtt file.

Once imported, a preview of your document file will appear, allowing you to highlight, tag, comment and search text content within your project and workspace.

You can change the preview within your note to display: Full document, Single page or Card. To access these options, click on the "More" button in the preview window.

Note: preview won't be available for other filetypes, e.g. zip files

You can import survey response data from a CSV spreadsheet for deeper analysis alongside your customer calls. In a project, you can view each participant’s completed survey structured on a single page, with a breakdown of each question and answer they have submitted.

The file should be UTF-8 encoded Comma Separated Value (CSV) file with a header row and have at least column each for:

• Title – text format (200 character limit)

• Content – required, text format (300,000 character limit). This becomes the body of the note, which you can later highlight and tag.

During import, you will need to map columns from your spreadsheet to how it will be presented on a page. For example, if you have a column for a specific question's answers, add them to the body of your note by mapping this to the option ‘Content’.

If your spreadsheet contains a date column, Dovetail might have already detected it, which will be green.

Any fields that have been added to notes will also be available as fields to import into.

Automatic sentiment analysis for CSV import

This feature has been deprecated. In it's place, we recommend leveraging the power of magic highlight to surface important quotes in your data.