Turn sessions
into one shared record.

A different approach to listening sessions and focus groups.

Most teams don’t actually choose between a listening session and a focus group. They run whatever they ran last time, book a room or a call, take notes by hand, and write up impressions from memory a week later. The real distinctions, size, structure, and how deep you can go with any one person, get flattened into “we did some research.” By the time someone asks what people actually said, the detail is gone and only the vibe survives.

Why the choice gets made by default, not by design

A listening session is typically a one-on-one or small conversation, unstructured enough that a participant can take it somewhere you didn’t plan. A focus group is a group setting with a moderator guiding several people through the same questions. The first goes deep with one person; the second surfaces how a room of people react to each other in real time. Neither is better, they answer different questions, but most teams default to whichever format they already know how to book, not the one the research question actually needs.

Reading either format the same way

Speak AI runs the same analysis engine over both formats. Every session, one-on-one conversations or full focus groups, is transcribed in your language, with 100+ supported, and then read on a second layer: the tone and energy in the room, not just the words on the page. Ask across your entire session history with AI chat, the same high-quality prompt workflows teams once stitched together manually, now running natively over your recordings with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini built in through the MCP server. Themes are tracked across the whole project, so a comment made in week one and again in week six show up as the same trend line, not two unrelated notes.

Questions researchers ask across the two formats

• “Which listening sessions surfaced ideas we haven’t heard in a focus group yet?”
• “Where did focus group participants seem to agree with the loudest voice in the room just to move on?”
• “Show me every session, either format, where pricing came up unprompted.”
• “Which one-on-one conversations went deepest on the return process complaint, and what did people actually say?”

From two separate write-ups to one comparable record

The result is a record where a listening session and a focus group sit side by side instead of living in two different note-taking habits. Customizable, white-label dashboards track theme frequency and sentiment across both formats over time, so this quarter’s sessions are measured against last quarter’s, not just described. One global market research firm, Olson Zaltman research, ran its studies through this workflow and saved $60K and 950 hours. And because the same engine scores interviews, calls, and meetings on the same criteria, listening sessions and focus groups connect to interview coding and coaching across every other conversation your team runs.