Robust research storage tools with great AI capabilities
April 12, 2025
Robust research storage tools with great AI capabilities
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Professional
Overall Satisfaction with Dovetail
We've been using Dovetail for the last three years as our research data repository, especially for recordings. It solves a couple of problems for us:
1. Tapping into the previous organizational knowledge. Whenever Product or Design have a research question on a topic that is not brand-new, we encourage them to check Dovetail for what we already collectively know on the topic. The addition of AI search summary has been super helpful to create an overview of what we already know, so that we can avoid duplication of efforts and focus new research on new questions.
2. Knowing where to go. It took us a while to get a broader team into a habit of thinking about Dovetail as a good source of research truth, but most PMs and Designers know where to start now. It reduces the number of trivial pings and allows product teams to explore on their own.
1. Tapping into the previous organizational knowledge. Whenever Product or Design have a research question on a topic that is not brand-new, we encourage them to check Dovetail for what we already collectively know on the topic. The addition of AI search summary has been super helpful to create an overview of what we already know, so that we can avoid duplication of efforts and focus new research on new questions.
2. Knowing where to go. It took us a while to get a broader team into a habit of thinking about Dovetail as a good source of research truth, but most PMs and Designers know where to start now. It reduces the number of trivial pings and allows product teams to explore on their own.
Pros
- Summaries of sessions and topic summaries across projects. The addition of AI summaries has been hugely helpful, and the quality of these summaries are pretty good. Lots of gained efficiency!
- Transcripts. Dovetail is not the best speech-to-text recognition software, but is a good one. Both our team and our customer base are global, and the quality of recognizing accents has become better over the years.
Cons
- Tagging vs highlighting is confusing; I am still not sure what the right use case for each and why I need both. As a result, different people use them interchangeably and it doesn't help consistency.
- It's either a product gap or my knowledge gap (in which case, it's not obvious how to do it), but I wish Dovetail could easily absorb information from other platforms we use during research projects. For example, we use Mural extensively for session notes, synthesis, and Slack for discussion / debrief. I wish I could collect all information about a session from multiple sources in one Dovetail page, so that Dovetail could give me a summary of a session across all data sources.
- When I compile insights, I feel I have to jump a lot between Notes and Insights, and usually put multiple instances of Dovetail as separate browser windows. Would be great to have multiple Dovetail panes within one browser tab, to work on a compilation in one pane while review notes in another.
- Selecting large amount of text is clunky. I wish I could mark the bookends of text I want to select instead of dragging the cursor to select what I need.
- I mentioned it before: Duplication of research effort is minimized and we can move faster by tapping into existing collective knowledge.
LOVE them, AI features made a lot of difference. I stopped taking notes during sessions at all, because I know that Dovetail will give me a good summary of a transcript.
Do you think Dovetail delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Dovetail's feature set?
Yes
Did Dovetail live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Dovetail go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Dovetail again?
Yes
Comments
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