# Intervey

> A survey that can ask follow-up questions

- **Client**: Proof of Concept
- **Date**: 2024

## Details

I spent months talking to managers, analysts, and market researchers about their survey tools. Same complaint every time: "We get surface-level answers that don't tell us anything useful." So I built [Intervey](https://intervey.wastu.net) as a proof of concept to see if AI could interview people better than static questionnaires.

The idea was simple: what if a survey could ask a follow-up when an answer was vague, or dig deeper when someone mentioned something interesting?

## What I learned

The technical part was not the hard part. The hard part was getting useful signals out of messy, emotional answers.

Hundreds of open-ended responses are not just a bigger spreadsheet. You need context, a way to catch contradictions, and prompts that encourage the system to dig deeper instead of summarizing everything into the same bland paragraph.

Reports were another problem. Turning "I feel frustrated sometimes but it's not terrible" into something a team can act on takes more than a summary button. That part took a lot of iteration.

## The prototype

The AI generates interview questions based on what you're trying to research. Then it conducts the interview, adapting based on each response. If someone gives a vague answer, it asks for specifics. If they mention something interesting, it follows up.

After the interview, it analyzes the responses and generates a report. The goal was to reduce the manual coding, not to pretend that the messy parts of research had disappeared.

## Where it stands

This project is shelved. No ETA on if I'll pick it back up. It proved the concept worked, but turning it into something people would pay for is a different problem.

I still use what I learned here in client work. Making an AI feel conversational is mostly about knowing when it should ask one more question instead of rushing to an answer.