How to Set Up AI Voice Interviews: A Researcher's Complete Guide

AI-powered voice interviews are the fastest way to run deep qualitative research at scale — no scheduling, no moderator burnout, and no transcript cleanup required. Koji's voice interview mode lets participants speak naturally with an AI interviewer that listens, probes, and adapts in real time, while you review rich transcripts and auto-generated insights in your dashboard.

This guide walks through everything you need to configure before launching a voice interview study: from research brief setup to interview mode selection, language settings, landing page branding, and quality optimization.

Why Voice? The Case for AI-Powered Spoken Research

Traditional user research methods require scheduling live sessions, training moderators, and manually transcribing recordings — a process that can take weeks and cost thousands of dollars per research cycle. Voice interviews with AI eliminate nearly all of that friction.

When participants speak rather than type, they express themselves more naturally, use richer language, and tend to share more emotional and contextual detail. Research shows that spoken responses average 3–5x more words than typed answers to the same question. Combined with Koji's AI interviewer — which probes for depth, asks follow-up questions, and guides the conversation across all your research topics — voice mode produces the kind of nuanced qualitative data that typically requires a skilled human moderator.

The key difference: Koji's AI runs 24/7, handles unlimited concurrent interviews, and never gets tired or introduces moderator bias. You can launch a voice study on Monday and have 50 rich, analyzed interviews by Wednesday.

Step 1: Create Your Study and Define the Research Brief

Before configuring voice settings, you need a clear research brief. Koji generates this automatically when you describe your research goal in natural language, but you can also edit it manually in the canvas editor.

A strong brief for a voice study includes:

Problem Context

• What question are you trying to answer?
• What decision will this research inform?
• What is your current hypothesis?
• What does it cost your team if this remains unanswered?

Target Participant

• Who should participate? (role, behavior, relevant experience)
• What is the screening question that qualifies them?

Methodology

Koji supports several built-in methodologies that shape how the AI probes follow-up questions:

• The Mom Test — great for validating ideas without getting false positives; focuses on past behavior rather than hypotheticals
• Jobs to be Done (JTBD) — ideal for understanding switching behavior and purchase triggers
• Customer Discovery — broad, exploratory research for early-stage products
• Exploratory — open-ended discovery when you don't know what you don't know
• Lead Magnet — designed to produce chartable, shareable insights for public reports

The methodology shapes how deeply the AI probes and what kinds of follow-up questions it asks. See Choosing a Methodology for guidance on which to use for your research goals.

Step 2: Enable Voice Mode

Once your brief is ready, go to your study's Customize tab to configure the interview experience.

Under Interaction Mode, you will find three settings:

• Enable Voice — toggle to allow participants to choose voice mode
• Enable Text — toggle to allow text mode as an option or fallback
• Default Mode — set whether the landing page defaults to voice or text

Best practices:

• If voice data quality is a priority, set Default Mode to Voice and keep text enabled as a fallback. Participants who cannot use a microphone will not be blocked.
• If you want exclusively voice data, you can disable text mode entirely — but this will reduce completion rates for participants in noisy environments or on mobile devices.
• For most studies, leaving both enabled with voice as default produces the best combination of data quality and completion rate.

Step 3: Configure Your Interview Language

Koji supports voice interviews in over 15 languages, including English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Hindi, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Turkish, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, and Swedish.

Set your study's language in the Interaction Mode section under Default Language. This controls:

• The language the AI interviewer speaks
• The language of speech-to-text transcription
• The language of the interview UI and on-screen instructions

When you set a non-English language, Koji automatically configures the underlying conversational agent for that language and selects an appropriate voice profile. Transcripts are captured in the native language, and AI analysis (quality scores, themes, insights) is generated in the same language.

For multilingual research spanning multiple markets, create separate studies per language with individual interview links. See Multi-Language Research for a full guide.

Step 4: Configure Your Landing Page

The landing page is the first thing participants see. A well-designed landing page significantly increases completion rates — the difference between a generic link and a well-crafted landing page is often a 2–3x lift in participation.

In the Customize tab, configure:

Headline and Description

Write a clear, welcoming headline that explains what the interview is about. Participants convert better when they understand the purpose upfront.

• ❌ "Research Study Q1 2025"
• ✓ "Share your experience with our checkout process — takes about 10 minutes"

Duration Badge

Enable the duration badge to show the estimated interview length. This is the single highest-impact trust element on the landing page. Participants who know the interview takes 10 minutes are far more likely to start than those who have no idea what they are committing to.

Anonymity Badge

Add an anonymity or privacy badge if participants might hesitate to share candidly. Common messages: "Your responses are anonymous", "This interview is confidential", or custom text.

Accent Color

Set a brand color to match your organization's identity. The landing page, animated background orb, and UI accents use this color — making the interview feel native to your brand rather than a generic research tool.

Step 5: Set Up an Intake Form (Optional)

An intake form collects participant information before the interview begins. This is useful for:

• Capturing email addresses for follow-up or incentive distribution
• Screening participants based on role, company size, or behavior
• Pre-populating participant records with CRM data

Configure up to 6 fields in the Lead Collection Form section. Supported field types include text, email, phone, select dropdown, textarea, and checkbox.

If you need to screen participants before they proceed, add a required Select field with your qualifying criteria. Participants who do not match can be shown a graceful redirect message.

See Intake Forms and Consent for detailed configuration options.

Step 6: Add Context Documents (Optional)

For studies involving a specific product, workflow, or concept, you can upload context documents that the AI interviewer uses to inform its questions and follow-ups.

Context documents are useful for:

• Product specs or mockup descriptions (concept testing)
• Customer journey maps (UX research)
• Feature release notes (post-launch feedback research)
• Competitive comparison data (win/loss research)

Upload documents in your study's Settings tab. The AI uses these as background knowledge but does not read them aloud to participants — it references them only when relevant to probe deeper on a specific topic.

Step 7: Customize Your Interview Slug

By default, Koji generates a random URL slug for your interview. You can customize it to something memorable and professional:

• koji.so/i/checkout-research-q1
• koji.so/i/enterprise-discovery
• koji.so/i/post-launch-feedback

Custom slugs are available on paid plans and configured in the Collect tab under Interview Link Settings. A clean, recognizable URL improves click-through rates in email campaigns and feels more professional when sharing with customers.

Step 8: Test Before You Launch

Before sending links to real participants, run a test interview yourself:

1. Open your interview link in a fresh browser window (or incognito mode)
2. Grant microphone permission when prompted
3. Complete the full interview, including all question types
4. Check the transcript in your dashboard for accuracy
5. Review the auto-generated quality score and AI insights

Listen and evaluate:

• Does the greeting feel natural and appropriate for your audience?
• Does the AI probe appropriately when you give short or vague answers?
• Does the interview cover all your key research questions?
• Is the transcript readable and accurate?

If the AI is not covering a particular topic, edit your research brief to be more explicit about that area. The brief is the source of truth for the AI's behavior — more specific briefs produce more targeted interviews.

Remember to archive your test responses in the Recruit tab so they do not affect your real analysis.

Step 9: Launch and Monitor

Share your interview link via:

• Email outreach (manual or via your CRM using personalized links)
• In-product prompts (embed or trigger after key user actions)
• Customer success sequences
• Research panels or recruitment platforms

Monitor incoming responses in your Results tab. Koji's quality gate automatically filters out low-quality or incomplete interviews before they affect your analysis.

Voice interviews are automatically transcribed, analyzed, and scored within minutes of completion. You do not need to wait for all responses before reviewing early themes — the Insights Dashboard updates in real time as new interviews arrive.

Voice Interview Best Practices

For study design:

• Keep your research brief focused on one core problem area. A tightly scoped brief produces more relevant voice data than a broad one.
• For qualitative saturation, aim for 15–40 participants depending on your topic and audience homogeneity.
• Set the interview duration expectation correctly — voice interviews typically run 8–15 minutes.

Tips to share with participants:

• Use Chrome or a Chromium-based browser for the best microphone support
• Wear headphones or earbuds to prevent echo
• Find a quiet space — background noise can interfere with speech detection
• Plan for about 10 minutes of uninterrupted time

What Happens After the Interview

Every completed voice interview automatically generates:

• Full transcript — timestamped, speaker-labeled text of the complete conversation
• Quality score — 1–5 rating based on relevance, depth, coverage, and engagement
• AI-generated insights — themes, sentiment, pain points, feature requests, and notable quotes
• Question coverage map — which research questions were covered and with what confidence

These feed directly into Koji's Insights Dashboard and Research Reports, giving you a complete analysis without any manual tagging, coding, or synthesis.

With platforms like Koji, the heavy lifting of voice research — scheduling, moderation, transcription, and analysis — is handled automatically. What once took weeks and a dedicated research team now takes days and a single researcher.