Understand the humans in your data, with AI-powered contextual chat

For your product team and wider organization, understanding customers is more essential than ever. However, sifting through mountains of data can be daunting, especially when insights are fragmented across various platforms or siloed within different departments.

Contextual chat was built to shatter these barriers—to bring customer knowledge to every team member across the entire organization and drive better decision-making at every level.

Dovetail’s contextual chat enables you to ask questions of your data in natural language and receive conversational AI-generated responses, as if you were having a conversation with your data itself. 

It’s been a month since we launched contextual chat, and we have loved to see how you’re using it to understand customer responses to product updates, to quickly recap recent customer calls, extract key takeaways from your projects, and more.

We’ve also heard your feedback on some of the challenges you’ve faced—hallucinations in AI responses, limitations concerning response specificity, and the desire to have your responses backed by citations. That’s why our team is actively working on several updates to make chat more useful, accurate, and trustworthy. We recently released citations on contextual chat responses, and we have many more updates in the works. Read on to discover what else is in store.

Why customers have loved using chat 

Powered by AI, contextual chat enables you to interact with interviews, research projects, channels, sales calls, and more, and get instant insights to help you make better, more strategic decisions.

You no longer need to conduct complicated searches and filters—contextual chat understands your context within Dovetail and gives you precise answers tailored to your current focus. It bridges the gap between raw data and actionable insights, making it accessible to everyone—from designers who might want to understand feedback on recent design changes, PMs wanting to drive their next roadmap decision, or sales leaders wanting to get a pulse check on recent customer calls.

Simply open the chat interface in Dovetail or hit Command + J, and start asking questions in natural language. 

This intuitive interaction is backed by AI, but what sets it apart from general LLMs is that it is context-aware. If you're in a project folder, it narrows its scope to that project. If you’re viewing an individual customer transcript, it dives deep into that specific conversation. 

Those of you who are getting the most value out of chat:

• Are specific in your queries—when viewing a transcript, you use chat to get quick takeaways from the call or interview. When wanting to understand insights from a project, you use chat at a project-level to get the answers you need.

• Ask follow-up questions—many of you are going deeper on particular queries to gain further context on your customer data.

• Navigate to the original data points through the response citations for further context or to view customer quotes.

What kinds of questions can you ask contextual chat?

A PM looking at a customer interview might ask “how is [customer] responding to our latest [feature] update?” to understand whether a product change has solved a customer problem.

A designer looking at data from usability tests might ask “How do users describe their experience with [feature]?”

A sales lead analyzing lost deals could ask, “What were the key objections raised about our pricing model?”

Contextual chat provides immediate, data-backed insights. Ask follow-up questions, pivot your investigation instantly, or zoom out to broader trends. It adapts to your needs in real-time.

As mentioned in Gartner’s Build Trust in Your AI Assistant With 3 Essential UX Elements, contextual chat knows where you are in Dovetail and applies that perspective to the AI responses.

The benefits of customer intelligence for the entire organization

Dovetail democratizes access to insights and unifies customer intelligence under a single platform. With contextual chat, understanding customer sentiment, trends across lost deals, or customer needs and pain points, is just a query away.

Breaking data silos

Large organizations often face data silos that prevent seamless collaboration. Contextual chat ensures every department—from sales and marketing to product and design—can extract relevant insights without relying on specialized research teams or complex search filters. It empowers non-researchers to self-serve insights directly from the source material.

Saving time on data analysis 

Instead of having to painstakingly analyse hours of customer interviews or sift through mountains of feedback surveys, usability tests, or sales calls to get the insights you need, Dovetail transforms swathes of complex data into insights instantly. 

Accelerating onboarding

New hires or team members unfamiliar with ongoing projects can quickly get up to speed. For example, new engineers can browse a workspace and ask, “What are the most common technical complaints from customers?” Instead of wading through endless documents, they receive tailored, actionable insights instantly.

Competitive advantage

Knowing your customer at a deeper level is one of the most effective ways to distinguish your business in the market. With contextual chat, critical insights are available to anyone, empowering your team to identify opportunities, address challenges, and craft strategies that resonate with customers.

Your data, your control

Contextual chat is built with enterprise-grade privacy controls. You control:

• What data is in context: You can chat with your data across documents, feedback, user interviews, surveys, or even entire folders, projects, and channels.

• Who sees what: Chat respects workspace permissions. If a user can’t access the data, they can’t ask questions about it.

• What gets shared externally: We do not use your data to train third-party AI models. Ever.

What’s new and coming soon

At Dovetail, we’re continuously enhancing the way our AI is integrated in the product to help you get closer to your customers and drive better business outcomes. Here’s what we’ve released recently in contextual chat and a glimpse into what’s ahead:

• Citations: Every contextual chat response is now meticulously sourced and directly traceable back to the original data point. Every quote, every trend, every insight is cited, meaning you and your team can seamlessly navigate to the data point sourced to gain further context. 

• Customized default prompts: We’ll be making chat’s starting prompts more tailored to your specific data, helping you to get the answers you need faster.

• Improved accuracy and more relevant responses: Our team is constantly working to improve the relevancy of contextual chat responses. Chat now looks at more points of information, including project overviews at a project level, improving its relevancy and accuracy. We’re also working to make responses more contextual based on your specific role.

• Dive deeper into your insights: contextual chat will soon give you the option to conduct in-depth AI-driven investigations into your customer data across multiple projects and automatically synthesize findings into a comprehensive, structured report with citations.

Help shape the future of contextual chat

We’re actively improving accuracy, context awareness, and reliability with every release. Your feedback helps us get better, faster.

What do you love? What’s not working? What do you wish it could do? You can share feedback directly in the product or reach out to our team anytime. We’re building this with you—and for you.

Experience the power of contextual chat for yourself. Start chatting with your data today and tell us how we could better help uncover customer insights for your team.