Introduction
Online forums have become an integral part of the internet landscape, providing a platform for individuals to discuss a wide range of topics, share information and connect with like-minded individuals. With the rise of social media and other online communication channels, forums may seem like a relic of the past, but they still play a vital role in facilitating meaningful conversations and building communities.
For researchers, marketers, and organizations, online forums offer a unique opportunity to gather insights and understand the thoughts, opinions, and behaviors of their target audience. However, with the sheer volume of data available on forums, manually analyzing and extracting valuable information can be a daunting task. This is where retrieval augmented generation (RAG) comes in, revolutionizing the way we analyze online forums.
What are Online Forums?
Online forums, also known as discussion boards or message boards, are online platforms where users can post messages and engage in conversations with other users. These forums are usually organized around a specific topic or theme and allow users to create threads, reply to existing threads, and engage in discussions. Online forums can be public or private, and they can take various forms, such as text-based, image-based, or a combination of both.
The Benefits of Analyzing Online Forums
As a researcher, marketer, or organization, there are numerous benefits to analyzing online forums. Here are some of the key advantages:
1. Gain Insights into Customer Behavior
One of the primary benefits of analyzing online forums is gaining insights into customer behavior. By monitoring discussions on forums, you can understand what your target audience is saying about your brand, products, or services. This can help you identify common pain points, preferences, and expectations, allowing you to make data-driven decisions to improve your offerings.
2. Understand Industry Trends and Competitors
Online forums are also a rich source of information about industry trends and competitor activities. By analyzing discussions on forums, you can gain a better understanding of what topics are currently trending, what new products or services are gaining traction, and how your competitors are positioning themselves in the market. This can help you stay ahead of the curve and make informed decisions to stay competitive.
3. Identify Influencers and Brand Advocates
Online forums are often filled with passionate individuals who are knowledgeable and influential within their respective communities. By analyzing discussions on forums, you can identify these influencers and brand advocates and engage with them to amplify your brand’s reach and credibility. These individuals can also provide valuable insights and feedback to help you improve your products or services.
4. Gather Feedback and Improve Customer Satisfaction
Online forums provide a platform for customers to share their experiences and provide feedback about your brand. By analyzing these discussions, you can identify areas where your brand is excelling and areas where there is room for improvement. This can help you proactively address customer concerns and improve overall customer satisfaction.
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Online Forums
Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a cutting-edge technology that combines natural language processing (NLP), large language models, data visualization, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionize the way we analyze online forums. RAG allows researchers, marketers, and organizations to automatically mine and analyze large volumes of forum data, extracting valuable insights and trends in a fraction of the time it would take to manually analyze the data.
With RAG, you can:
– Automatically summarize forum discussions to get an overview of the main topics and sentiments being discussed.
– Identify key themes and trends in forum discussions to gain a deeper understanding of customer preferences and pain points.
– Extract specific keywords and phrases to identify important topics and discussions within the forum.
– Cluster forum discussions to identify common threads and group discussions by topic or sentiment.
– Visualize forum data to gain a better understanding of the overall sentiment, tone, and topics being discussed.
– Use generative AI to automatically generate responses to forum discussions, saving time and effort in manually responding to individual posts.
Conclusion
In today’s digital age, online forums continue to play a crucial role in facilitating meaningful discussions and building communities. For researchers, marketers, and organizations, these forums offer a unique opportunity to gather valuable insights and understand their target audience. With the help of retrieval augmented generation (RAG), analyzing online forums has become more efficient and effective, allowing for quicker and more accurate decision-making. So, whether you’re looking to gain insights into customer behavior, stay up-to-date with industry trends, or improve customer satisfaction, RAG can help you unlock the full potential of online forums.
How To Use Speak’s Retrieval Augmented Generation For Online Forums
Step 1: Create Your Speak Account
To start your transcription and analysis, you first need to create a Speak account. No worries, this is super easy to do!
Get a 14-day trial with 30 minutes of free audio and video transcription and analysis included when you sign up for Speak.
To sign up for Speak and start using Speak Magic Prompts with retrieval augmented generation, just visit the Speak app register page here.
Step 2: Upload Your Online Forums
We typically recommend MP4s for video or MP3s for audio.
However, we accept a range of audio, video and text file types.
You can upload your file for transcription in several ways using Speak:
Accepted Audio File Types
- MP3
- M4A
- WAV
- OGG
- WEBM
- M4P
Accepted Video File Types
- MP4
- M4V
- WMV
- AVI
- MOV
- FLV
Accepted Text File Types
- TXT
- Word Doc
CSV Imports
You can also upload CSVs of text files or audio and video files. You can learn more about CSV uploads and download Speak-compatible CSVs here.
With the CSVs, you can upload anything from dozens of YouTube videos to thousands of Online Forums files.
Publicly Available URLs
You can also upload media to Speak through a publicly available URL.
As long as the file type extension is available at the end of the URL you will have no problem importing your recording for automatic transcription and analysis.
YouTube URLs
Speak is compatible with YouTube videos. All you have to do is copy the URL of the YouTube video (for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKfcLcHeivc).
Speak will automatically find the file, calculate the length, and import the video.
If using YouTube videos, please make sure you use the full link and not the shortened YouTube snippet. Additionally, make sure you remove the channel name from the URL.
Speak Integrations
As mentioned, Speak also contains a range of integrations for Zoom, Zapier, Vimeo and more that will help you automatically transcribe your media.
This library of integrations continues to grow! Have a request? Feel encouraged to send us a message.
Step 3: Calculate and Pay the Total Automatically
Once you have your file(s) ready and load it into Speak, it will automatically calculate the total cost (you get 30 minutes of audio and video free in the 14-day trial – take advantage of it!).
If you are uploading text data into Speak, you do not currently have to pay any cost. Only the Speak Magic Prompts analysis would create a fee which will be detailed below.
Once you go over your 30 minutes or need to use Speak Magic Prompts, you can pay by subscribing to a personalized plan using our real-time calculator.
You can also add a balance or pay for uploads and analysis without a plan using your credit card.
Step 4: Wait for Speak to Analyze Your Online Forums
If you are uploading audio and video, our automated transcription software will prepare your transcript quickly. Once completed, you will get an email notification that your transcript is complete.
That email will contain a link back to the file so you can access the interactive media player with the transcript, analysis, and export formats ready for you.
If you are importing CSVs or uploading text files Speak will generally analyze the information much more quickly.
Speak will automatically embed your data in a well-architected vector database which allows you to use retrieval augmented generation for Online Forums.
Step 5: Visit Your File Or Folder
Speak is capable of analyzing both individual files and entire folders of data.
When you are viewing any individual file in Speak, all you have to do is click on the “Prompts” button.
If you want to analyze many files, all you have to do is add the files you want to analyze into a folder within Speak.
You can do that by adding new files into Speak or you can organize your current files into your desired folder with the software’s easy editing functionality.
Step 6: Select Speak Magic Prompts To Analyze Your Online Forums
What Are Magic Prompts?
Speak Magic Prompts leverage innovation in artificial intelligence models often referred to as “generative AI”.
These models have analyzed huge amounts of data from across the internet to gain an understanding of language.
With that understanding, these “large language models” are capable of performing mind-bending tasks!
With Speak Magic Prompts, you can now perform those tasks on the audio, video and text data in your Speak account.
Retrieval augmented generation is what makes these Magic Prompts work so well.
Step 7: Select or Create Your Assistant Type
To help you get better results from Speak Magic Prompts, Speak has introduced “Assistant Type”.
These assistant types pre-set and provide context to the prompt engine for more concise, meaningful outputs based on your needs.
To begin, we have included:
- General
- Researcher
- Marketer
- Sales
- Recruiter
Choose the most relevant assistant type from the dropdown.
You can also create your own custom Assistant Template Type.
If you visit the new page Account Preferences, you can see there is now an area where you can create your own custom Assistant.
This allows you to set the context of the engine for higher quality and more consistent outputs.
For example, you could say:
“We are [COMPANY NAME]. We are analyzing [DATA] to understand how to improve [GOAL]. We want all responses to be concise and in table format.”.
This becomes a reusable template in any of your manual or automated Magic Prompts.
You can create multiple templates for different use cases.
As an example, the analysis you run on a focus group may be different than a one-on-one interview.
Step 8: Create Or Select Your Desired Prompt
Here are some examples prompts that you can apply to any file right now:
- Create a SWOT Analysis
- Give me the top action items
- Create a bullet point list summary
- Tell me the key issues that were left unresolved
- Tell me what questions were asked
A modal will pop up so you can use the suggested prompts we shared above to instantly and magically get your answers.
If you have your own prompts you want to create, select “Custom Prompt” from the dropdown and another text box will open where you can ask anything you want of your data!
Step 9: Review & Share Responses
Speak will generate a concise response for you in a text box below the prompt selection dropdown. With Chat enabled, you can also continue to query that data to reveal more insights and reformat the information to your needs.
In this example, we ask to analyze all the Online Forums in the folder at once for the top product dissatisfiers.
You can easily copy that response for your presentations, content, emails, team members and more!
Speak Magic Prompts Pricing
Our team at Speak Ai continues to optimize the pricing for Magic Prompts and Speak as a whole.
Right now, anyone in the 14-day trial of Speak gets 100,000 characters included in their account.
If you need more characters, you can easily include Speak Magic Prompts in your plan when you create a subscription.
You can also upgrade the number of characters in your account if you already have a subscription.
Both options are available on the subscription page.
Alternatively, you can use Speak Magic Prompts by adding a balance to your account. The balance will be used as you analyze characters.
Completely Personalize Your Plan 📝
Here at Speak, we’ve made it incredibly easy to personalize your subscription.
Once you sign up, just visit our custom plan builder and select the media volume, team size, and features you want to get a plan that fits your needs.
No more rigid plans. Upgrade, downgrade or cancel at any time.
Claim Your Special Offer 🎁
When you subscribe, you will also get a free premium add-on for three months!
That means you save up to $50 USD per month and $150 USD in total.
Once you subscribe to a plan, all you have to do is send us a live chat with your selected premium add-on from the list below:
- Premium Export Options (Word, CSV & More)
- Custom Categories & Insights
- Recorder Customization (Branding, Input & More)
- Media Player Customization
- Shareable Media Libraries
We will put the add-on live in your account free of charge!
What are you waiting for?
Refer Others & Earn Real Money 💸
If you have friends, peers and followers interested in using our platform, you can earn real monthly money.
You will get paid a percentage of all sales whether the customers you refer to pay for a plan, automatically transcribe media or leverage professional transcription services.
Use this link to become an official Speak affiliate.
Check Out Our Dedicated Resources📚
Book A Free Implementation Session 🤝
It would be an honour to personally jump on an introductory call with you to make sure you are set up for success.
Just use our Calendly link to find a time that works well for you. We look forward to meeting you!
