Dovetail Pros and Cons

Dovetail is the best platform for transcribing audio files. I used it to transcribe five audio files totaling 450 minutes while evaluating audio and Zoom videos for my bachelor’s thesis. The audios were in German. In my search for the fastest and most helpful transcription tool, I tried multiple paid platforms. However, I found that Dovetail, which is free, offered much better quality and was easier to work with than any of the premium tools. I transcribed and revised all my transcriptions using Dovetail.

Not only was its automatic transcription superior to others, but it was also the best tool to work with due to its simple and comfortable design. I am more than thankful! I love this tool and will recommend it to everyone. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Of course, it would be great if the tool didn’t need any revision of the transcription. However, even I found it hard to understand some speakers, so it’s probably unrealistic to expect a tool to transcribe with 100% accuracy. So I found nothing to dislike about Dovetail. It’s a tool you can count on. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't even know where to start — there's so much to love. But the biggest a-ha moment for me was that with each project, I don't have to have my "system" or SOP all figured out at the beginning.

Here's what I mean by that:

As the project evolves and patterns start to emerge, you can make Dovetail morph to your needs!

In contrast to spreadsheets — which are so tedious to manipulate after the fact — Dovetail lets you adjust your entire framework as you go along.

This is AWESOME.

Why?

Because with every research project, you simply can't predict the patterns you're going to see. Duh! And Dovetail helps you adapt and tweak things along the way (e.g., merging tags and tag categories, adding new cateogores, moving tags between categores, you name it).

It allows my process to be both organic and extremely organized.

The second thing I love about Dovetail is that it's not limited to just video content. So you can really pool all kinds of channels, sources, mediums, files into your project and tag things the same way across the board.

The third, and arguably, the best thing about Dovetail is you have countless ways of "viewing" your research. The ability to see things as a board, a canvas, or a table is awesome. The flexibility allows you to view your research in the most meaningful way at that point in time. And that's always going to be different for each project or phase of the project! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Right now the only place I'd love to see some improvement is in the AI capabilities.

There are some "Magic" features, as Dovetail calls them, but the outputs are usable maybe 50% of the time. I would love to see more of a ChatGPT-style capability where I could ask AI to give me richer, more accurate, more comprehensive outputs based on content I ask it to include. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail feels like my research superpower. I easily raved about Dovetail pre-magic AI features because it was still so easy and powerful for helping me take my interviews through documentation and analysing for key insights + sharing and empowering my team with that information. And now, with new magic (AI) capabilities and where I think they are going next with the product, I am not only raving, but I am full fan-girl!!! It's hard to summarise in a few sentences! Now I can import an interview recording, click a few buttons and have summaries, highlights (using my custom tags) and shareable insights. What took me days now takes me minutes and I have more time to focus on using my research than analysing it. Getting started is also a piece of cake because they have templates you can use straight out the box and I use the google integration to quickly pull in my interviews after a google meet recording. I use Dovetail daily and it's become a staple resource from our Founders to our software engineers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes the transcribing works really well and other times it's a bit off and combines phrases from multiple speakers together in a single block. It's never been a deal breaker though because the rest of the product is so good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail saves me a TON of time & energy daily, by offering AI/NLP powered transcriptions of all my research interviews. It allows our enterprise organization to maintain a "central brain" for research data - democratizing information and making insights accessible across a global organization. It's incredibly easy to get started - and free for securely publishing + collaborating on feedback, internally. Their customer support is prompt and effective. And it seamlessly integrates with services we use like Google for effective collaboration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One challenge we've experienced is that the AI/NLP can be "too good" - and the automation of ML generated summarization can lead to laziness on the part of interviewers, when it comes to tagging content. You've got to stay on top of your users to prevent "garbage in, garbage out"! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Using Dovetail was simple to get started with as the onboarding workflow is very well documented and transparent. The platform was extremely easy to get integrated into your research operations process and we quickly began using it on all projects that needed analysis work. Dovetail allowed us to move our UX Research war room style approach into the cloud while remaining highly collaborative amongst the team. When the platform added its AI feature set, we were able to better utitlize our most senior resources thanks to the offloading of the more tactical tasks of research analysis and allowing our researchers to focus much more on the interpretation of the results that were highlighted by the tool. The platform allows us to multiple the effect of each researcher we have by providing them with the toolset that allows them to focus on the most impactful and important parts of their skillset. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

One of the challenges that we have had with Dovetail is in finding a reusable configuration of the platform for an organization like ours. We have often desired deeper controls on a client experience layer. The platform feels as if it has a few hurdles that stand in the way of being a great experience for organizations that do research work on behalf of many different clients instead of a select few. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the automatic transcriptions of user interview videos. The transcripts are usually highly accurate to what the user is saying. Even if they are not, you have the ability to easily change what the transcript says.

I also like their Tagging feature - the way you're easily able to use Tags you already created or create a new one right there on the spot. The Tags also keep a running count of how many times they have been used which is helpful for determining where there might be issues in your interface or what problems users are facing. Having the ability to apply more than one Tag to any content is helful too.

Customer support is fantastic too!! The Slack Community (if your org lets you access Slack) is a great resource.

Lastly, the fact that they are continually updating the platform is great!! Always using the newest designs and technology to make the platform even easier to use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There's really not much to dislike about Dovetail.

If I had to pick one thing, I would say that because the system is so flexible and you're able to use it for anything, there is almost a lack of ... guard rails or guideance for how to set up your proejcts, etc. Like with MS Word, you know what to put in a table or into a paragraph. But with Dovetail, since it is SO open and flexible, it is almost too open. If that makes sense. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail simplifies the process of organising and analysing user research. Whether you're running usability tests, interviews, or surveys, you can configure projects to suit your specific research needs. The transcription, tagging, and automatic summarisation, saves researchers an immense amount of time by speeding up data processing. While the automated highlight grouping feature makes it fast to pull out key insights and identify patterns across projects.

The platform is great for sharing research with the wider business, in particular the highlight reels are easy to put together and share, bringing user feedback to everyone, not just the research team. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Having more customisable ways to present insights could be useful to enhance the overall experience and allow researchers to better tailor findings for different audiences and business needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Re-use of data - you can instantly find answers to questions, summaries of topics and curated lists of tags and insights from past research, making research faster and cheaper as yu don't have to re-run studies to find answers you already have. Dovetail are always innovating and updating the product and listening to customer requests. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's very expensive. The learning curve (whilst easy for basic tasks) is fairly steep to really get it set up for long term cross project sharing of insights and finding insights in a sea of data. The product frequently changes with new updates, sometimes for the better, but sometimes without notice moving things around so they become harder to find or use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love the flexiblity of Dovetail. When I need to get to insight fast to decide on the direction of what I'm working on, I can easily ask Dovetail for answers. And if any customer or market data is missing I can quickly conduct my own investigation and analyze all kinds of data in a fun to use tool. It's great! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail is flexible and I highly recommend taking time to think through how to set up the solution to scale. It's easy to get started with one-off projects without thinking through how stakeholders will engage and leverage the tool as well. Ultimately Dovetail show compounding returns when the whole enterprise is connected to a single source of truth when it comes to customer insights, and that takes some planning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Dovetail gives me the ability to organize and present research reports in a graphically appealing way. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Uploading files is more onerous than it should be. I have to hand-select each file I want to upload and then tag it myself. There is a good opportunity for Dovetail to streamline this process. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.