Stories are the best way to bring the voice of the customer to your team and organization. As you know, they stitch highlights together into shareable videos and combine this with the AI-generated titles and content.

Stories truly help you build empathy for your customers. We’ve seen NEXT users share stories with their product teams (designers, developers, marketing, etc), but also with their C-suite or other departments. Stories make your insights go beyond what you could have imagines!

And today, we’re introducing an all-new experiences for people to watch stories! A more immersive player, highlights as small video clips at the bottom and a dedicate space for the Story description, which is generally created by the AI chat.

Log in to NEXT today, create a Story and watch it come to life 🎬

Our users record calls in many tools, such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, HubSpot and Google Meet. We want to make it as easy as possible to get relevant data into the application. Therefore, we’ve just launched our Google Drive integration. This lets you import recordings stored in a Google Drive folder seamlessly into your NEXT teamspace. The way it works is simple. First, go to your personal settings to connect your Google Drive account. Then, open the teamspace in which you want to import Google Drive recordings. In the Recordings tab, click “Add recording” and click on “Import from Google Drive”. Uploading recordings to NEXT made easy 🧘‍♀️

As your usage of NEXT grows, you’ll likely work in multiple teamspaces at the same time. For example, you might have a teamspace for different products or product areas, or perhaps you’ll have a teamspace for specific use cases, such as the collection of future opportunities. To help you quickly find the teamspace you’re currently working in you can now “favorite” them by clicking the “star” in front of the teamspace name on the “Home” page.

NEXT AI is running on the data that you import from various sources, such as user interviews, customer success calls, sales meetings, and more. Getting this data into NEXT should be a breeze! Therefore, we’ve just improved our Zoom integration. From now on, you can connect Zoom and set it up to automatically import your recordings to NEXT. No need to worry about clicking the import button any longer – you’re data will be ready to go the moment you are!🚀

Sharing stories of key customer moments is the key to building empathy for your customers in your organization and beyond. To make stories even more appealing, we’ve enhance the social sharing experience of stories. Whenever you share a story on LinkedIn, Slack or elsewhere, you’ll get to see a beautiful preview of the story where you share it. This makes the story recognizable and more attractive to watch. Start sharing key customer moments today with stories and make the customer voice go further 🎙️

NEXT AI’s chat works on the highlights and highlights titles. This means that the highlights you “feed” to the chat are important to get the responses you’re looking for. By default, NEXT will automatically make a selection of highlights it uses based on your prompt. However, if you’re looking for more precise answers, you can give the AI a helping hand by first searching highlights related to a certain topic before starting the chat.

Before today, you’d have to go to the highlights library, search highlights, select them and start the chat. From now on, this become a whole lot easier! Simply open the chat page, find the search box on top of the page and use natural language to search for highlights relevant to what you’re looking for. Then, navigate to the chat at the bottom of the page, type your prompt and the chat will use a pre-selection of the most relevant highlights based on your search.

Getting amazing responses from the chat has never been easier! 🙌

Nobody likes waiting, so we just made a few major speed improvements for loading times of recordings and highlights. When you now open a recording, the highlights and transcript will load simultaneously and a lot faster than before.

We just gave NEXT an all-new icon set - making the app feel more modern and breezy! Log in to NEXT and experience it see the new icons and look-and-feel in real-life.

The most relevant highlights the AI generates, or that you create manually, are likely those that reflect the customer’s voice. To help you quickly identify the speaker tied to a highlights, we now show you the speaker’s name in the highlight lister. Just open any recording that contains highlights, find the highlights in the left-bottom corner of the screen and see the names of the speakers appear. Keep in mind, if you did not name speakers in your transcript just yet, make sure to add them in the transcript.

Experience our updated navigation designed for clarity and ease. Navigate to the "Ask AI" tab for direct, on-the-spot customer insights. Looking for past data? The "Library" is your centralized hub for recordings, highlights, and stories, covering everything from user interviews to sales calls. This streamlined navigation embodies NEXT's core purpose: make insights accessible through the power of AI for your entire product organization. Log in now to see the changes firsthand!

Say hello to Custom AI Instructions, your ticket to shaping AI's responses to suit your unique needs and contexts 🎯

Think of these instructions as your own personal AI compass, seamlessly integrated into every AI-driven action, be it crafting AI stories, extracting highlights, or engaging in AI chats. They act as guiding beacons, fine-tuning AI's comprehension and ensuring you receive the most relevant and tailored answers 🧭

🔍 Use Cases:

🔹 Providing Context: Tailor AI's insights for specific projects or scenarios by inputting contextual instructions like, "Act as a senior UX researcher. Investigate the billing module of our car entertainment app."

🔹 Research Focus: For targeted projects, direct AI with instructions like, "Act as a user tester. Focus on feedback related to tablet usage."

🔹 Cultural Sensitivity: Launching a product in a new region? Use instructions like, "Act as a researcher. Evaluate from the perspective of South Asian cultural norms."

🔹 Language Preferences: Request responses in your preferred language. For instance, guide AI with: "Act as a senior UX researcher. Always respond in Spanish."

🛠️ How to Configure AI Custom Instructions:

1. Navigate to the teamspace header and click on the 'more' menu option.

2. From the dropdown, select the "AI Custom Instructions" option.

🤝 Good to Know:

✅ Consistency Across Team: Custom instructions are shared across all teamspace members to ensure consistency. Uniformity is key!

✅ AI's Autonomy: Remember, these are guides, not commands. AI's responses may vary based on context.

✅ Responsibility Matters: If AI seems off-track, consider revising or removing your custom instructions. We're here to help—reach out to NEXT Support for guidance in crafting effective instructions.

Empower your AI experience like never before with Custom Instructions.

The heart of NEXT AI lies in our chat – your team's gateway to the wealth of insights you're building with every customer interaction. It lets you ask questions about customer insights and responds with summaries, backlog tickets, product requirement documents, personas, or anything you like. The possibilities with NEXT AI's chat are endless.

Our goal is to let anyone experience the value of NEXT AI as quickly as possible. Therefore, we've made a significant change:

When you sign up for NEXT, you'll start with the chat. It's a more intuitive beginning to your journey and lets you experience NEXT AI from the get-go. You'll be asked to import your first recording or connect your Zoom account first. In the background, NEXT AI takes care of analyzing your content, and the chat opens automatically. You can start typing and get meaningful insights from your data instantly. Welcome to the new, chat-first vision of NEXT AI 🚀

We're thrilled to announce a game-changing addition to NEXT AI: a Zoom Integration. Now, effortlessly connect your Zoom account to NEXT AI and wave goodbye to manual recording uploads - simply import any cloud recording from Zoom with the click of a button.

🎥 Effortless Cloud Recording Import: Say farewell to tedious uploads. Connect your Zoom account, and we'll import your cloud recordings seamlessly.

🤖 Automated Transcription and Analysis: Once your recordings are imported, NEXT AI automatically transcribes and analyzes them for you, so you can start focus on what matters most: making evidence-based decisions on your product.

In the dynamic landscape of product discovery, aligning insights, ideas, and actions is essential. That's why we're excited to unveil a powerful new integration between NEXT and Productboard. This integration streamlines your journey from capturing raw customer conversations to transforming them into actionable user stories, all while eliminating the manual effort of transposing insights.

For teams leveraging NEXT to capture and dissect customer interactions, alongside Productboard for insight management and prioritization, this integration is a game-changer. Gone are the days of painstakingly converting raw data into insights and copy-pasting them manually to Productboard. With the NEXT-Productboard integration, you can seamlessly transition from evidence to valuable insights with unprecedented ease.

Here's how it works:

1. Capture and Elevate: Utilize NEXT as your go-to tool for capturing raw customer interactions. The power of AI chat within NEXT enables you to unearth evidenced user insights effortlessly.

2. Craft with Precision: Harness the AI capabilities of NEXT to transform your raw data into actionable insights. As the AI chat composes insights from evidence, you're one step closer to actionable ideas.

3. Seamless Transition: With your crafted insight in hand, it's time to make the leap. A simple click on "Share" is all it takes to generate a comprehensive story from the AI chat response.

4. Send to Productboard: But we're not done yet. The magic continues as you seamlessly share your insights directly into Productboard. No more manual transcription, no more hassle—just a swift, fluid process.

5. Prioritize with Precision: Within Productboard's insights backlog, you gain the power to prioritize and manage your insights with finesse. Your ideas are ready to take shape as user stories.

6. Effortless Dispatch: And when the time comes, send your insights forthwith to your preferred development platforms—be it Jira, Azure DevOps, GitHub, or Linear. The integration ensures that your insights transform into tangible actions, seamlessly.

With our new integration, your workflow gains efficiency and fluidity. Move swiftly from evidence to actionable insights to user stories, all while minimizing manual intervention. It's a shift in how you channel your customer conversations into tangible product improvements.

Elevate your process today with the NEXT-Productboard integration—where capturing, crafting, and converting insights are seamlessly woven together. Embrace the future of streamlined product discovery and development 🚀

Prompt templates make it easier to get great quality AI chat responses. From now on, you can create custom prompt templates for your teamspace yourself with ease.

As a quick reminder, prompt templates combine the selection of the right context (highlights) with a high quality prompt - all with a single click! They work great for recurring team routines, such as a weekly summary of your customer conversations to share with your stakeholders or getting an overview of unmet user requirements every week to share with your product owner.

The best results are achieved if you tailor your prompt templates to the topic you're working on. For example, include in the prompt template a highlight search term for the specific topic you're working on and then infuse in the prompt this topic for the best results.

Creating your prompt templates is easy: click the […] behind the teamspace name, click "Prompt templates" and start creating!

Want to know more or need help, reach out to our customer success team.

The use cases for NEXT AI's chat are endless, but regardless of the use case you're using the chat for, sharing the response of the chat is almost always the next step. For example, if you let the chat write a user story for you, you'll want to send it to Jira or Azure Devops. If you let the chat summarize a recording or list key user pains, you'll likely want to share it with someone in your team or a stakeholder via Microsoft Teams, Slack, or even email. From now on, this is easier than every before! Simply click the "Copy" button in the right-upper corner of the chat response and past it anywhere you like.

Every time you create a highlight in a transcript, NEXT AI will quickly summarize it for you by giving it a title automatically. Alternatively, you can give each highlight a title manually. In any case, there's nothing more frustrating than to click outside the highlight creation dialog accidentally and losing the highlight title you (or the AI) created. Therefore, we now show you a friendly warning pop-up before closing the highlighting dialog. Simply choose "Cancel" if you accidentally pressed outside the dialog, or click "Discard" if you don't want to keep the highlight.

In the world of product discovery and UX research, the importance of data privacy cannot be overstated. This is especially true when dealing with personal data such as audio and video recordings. UX researchers often gather this type of data to gain deeper insights into user behavior and enhance the customer/user experience.

Audio and video recordings of customer interactions are forms of personal data and are protected under privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These laws mandate that such data should be handled with utmost care to protect the privacy and rights of individuals. Violations can result in severe penalties, reputational damage, and a loss of user trust. Therefore, it's crucial to have an efficient way to manage and protect this data.

To aid in this critical aspect of data privacy, NEXT now offers data sanitization of recordings.

This new feature lets you remove the media from recordings and related highlights and stories with a single click, while holding onto the essential text part (transcript). This lets you respect the data retention policies and commitments made to your interviewees, without compromising on customer insights you've collected🙌

The way it works is simple. Just select one or multiple recordings on the recordings overview page, click the […] at the bottom of the page and click "Sanitize". NEXT will do the rest for you.

For more information about recording sanitization, check out this help article.

Quickly summarizing an interview? Writing a bug report? Or creating an implementation ticket for your development team? Our latest one-click AI prompt templates on recordings and highlights make this a breeze and will greatly boost your productivity 🚀

Wherever you are in the app, you can simply click the "sparkles" on a recording or highlight to find prompt templates that can be triggered with a single click. They let you start the chat while feeding the selected highlight or recording to the AI chat as context. And we have just added a few amazing new prompt templates. Go to NEXT today or sign up and try it out yourself!

We know that sometimes our AI might miss important customer moments, leaving you to manually create highlights. We believe that the best results come from a collaboration between AI and humans. That's why we're thrilled to announce a new feature!

From now on, when you create highlights manually, a nifty pop-up will appear. The AI will automatically come up with a title (or summary) for the selected text. This means you don't have to waste time writing a title yourself. You can simply tag and create highlights using the AI-generated title. And don't worry, if you want to tweak the title, you can do that too. It's a real time-saver when you're diving into customer conversations.

With this enhancement, we're making sure that our AI and humans work together seamlessly, giving you the best possible experience and results.

At NEXT, we believe AI isn't replacing humans. Instead, it's the connection between human and AI that will have most impact. Therefore, NEXT AI's chat is now combining the best of both worlds: the AI-generated responses from the chat always backed by real evidence in the form of related highlights and people (creators). The way it works is simple: start typing and wait for a response. At the bottom of the response you'll find the underlying evidence in the form of highlights and people who created it. Click on one of the highlights to play them back or explore more related evidence by clicking on "See more". Tracing back AI responses and building trust in AI's capabilities has never been easier!🙌

We're introducing "threading" to NEXT AI's chat, which makes it 10x more powerful! The chat can be used to identify insights, answer questions based on customer insights, and more. However, with threading, we're taking its capabilities to the next level. After the chat responded, you can now ask follow-up questions, ask it to respond from different angles, or even ask it to refine responses. The way it works is simple. All you need to do is keep typing after the chat responded and engage in a conversation with NEXT AI 💬

The chat can be used for a variety of different use cases, ranging from getting a quick snapshot of feedback, to crafting personas, writing bug reports, or suggesting follow-up research topics. As you start exploring these use cases more-and-more, you'll probably want to keep track of your chats, keep them neatly organized, or even go back to them at a later stage. From now on, you can have as many chats running in parallel as you like, rename them, and keep them organized on the left-hand side of the chat page. If you're done with a chat, simply remove them to clean up your chat page.

Using NEXT AI's chat is simple – all you need to do is start typing! However, if you want to use the chat for more specific use cases, such as letting it write bug reports or craft user personas, it helps to provide the AI with tailored context. This will yield the best possible results.

From now on, providing the right context is easy! Simply click on the sparkles on any recording or highlight, either on the recordings page, highlights page or inside a recording, and trigger the chat based on the selected content. Then, you can ask the chat anything you like, while it will only focus on what you need.

Getting the best results from AI requires two things: a great prompt and meaningful context. For the NEXT AI Chat, this means that the best results are achieved when first searching and selecting the right context, such as recording or highlights and then start the chat and write a great prompt.

We understand not everyone wants to become a "prompt engineer" and there may even be some team rituals that you want to repeat on a weekly or even daily basis. Searching and selecting context and writing prompts can be daunting and time consuming. Therefore, you can now easily predefine your most-often used prompts and search queries into a "prompt template". For example, want to get a quick feedback snapshot? Template the prompt and search query and get amazing results with a single click!

We have predefined a few prompt templates for you already, but if you want to create your own, get in touch via success@nextapp.co.

NEXT AI's chat can be an amazing productivity booster, especially if you can easily trigger the chat from the right context from anywhere, anytime. That's why we're introducing single-click AI actions on recordings and highlights. With a single click, you can now simply ask AI to summarize recordings, extract user pains from an interview, create a bug report from a highlight, and much more – all with one click!

The way it works is simple. Throughout the app you'll see the "sparkle" icon on recordings and highlights (in the recording page or highlights library). Click the sparkle and click on the action of your choice. This will open the AI chat based on the selected recording or highlight and use only that as its context.

Are you missing single-click use cases? Get in touch and we might be able to create one-click templates tailored to your needs!

Your privacy and security is our #1 priority and we want to make sure AI is available for all our customers. Therefore, we're thrilled to announce that Admin users of Enterprise customers can now choose how they want to deploy our AI capabilities, either via OpenAI (US) directly or via Microsoft Azure (West Europe). This enterprise feature make compliance to your organizations guidelines on AI and data residency a lot easier.

NEXT AI offers tremendous productivity gains for researchers, with transcription, automatically identifying key customer moments, and more. However, that's just part of the value! Across the board, we see that UX research is incredibly understaffed in product teams. Research shows that for every 8 members of a product team, there's only 1 UX researcher. And this researcher can never be in every single decision meeting. Therefore, to make customer insights go further and have more impact, it's key to make them accessible to anyone in the team. Until today, there was never an easy, meaningful way to do that.

That's where NEXT AI Chat comes in. Our chat lets anyone in a product team "ask" for customer insights from anywhere, anytime. Simply open the chat and type away!

Besides asking for customer insights, you can also ask it to suggest follow-up research topics or questions, help create personas, cluster feedback, and much more. The chat can be trigger from the top navigation menu, or from any specific piece of content (one or multiple recordings or highlights).

Curious to see what NEXT AI's chat can do for you? Log in (or sign up) and try it out today! For any questions, feel free to shoot us a message any time.

We're excited to announce NEXT AI✨ NEXT AI accelerates the entire research & discovery flow from interview to insight. It will let you do more, faster, and better product discovery while reducing your time and effort by up to 85%. You can think of NEXT AI as your discovery assistant. It transcribes, analyzes, identifies, tags, and summarizes insights from your customer interactions, like interviews or usability tests.

What can NEXT AI do for you?

• Transcribe recordings — after you've uploaded the recording of a user interview or usability test, NEXT AI will identify the language (today we support 48 languages), transcribe the recording into text, identify the speakers, and time stamp the entire transcript.

• Analyze recordings — NEXT AI can analyze customer sessions extracting key customer moments. NEXT AI will clip the recording and create reels, highlight the transcript, tag the highlight with keywords, and summarize the highlights with a brief title.

• Create stories — to quickly share the gist of a customer session with your team, NEXT AI will select and stitch together relevant highlights from a recording and provide a short summary with key points from the session.

NEXT AI is switched on by default and will kick in the moment you upload a recording or click "Create story" from a recording you uploaded. If you don't see the "✨" in the "Add recording" or "Create story" button your organization likely hasn't enabled NEXT AI yet. If that's the case, reach out to success@nextapp.co for help.

To get started with AI, log in to NEXT of sign up for a free account!

Our latest update brings a fresh new look and feel to the Highlights Library. Browsing and managing your highlights has never been easier, thanks to a variety of new features that make it simpler than ever to find what you need.

The gallery view shows the thumbnail of the highlight, tags, highlight title, creator, and timestamp, allowing you to quickly browse through all your highlights. But if you prefer a more text-based approach, the table view is optimized for consuming highlight text, showing columns for the highlight title, highlighted text, tags, creator, and timestamp.

To filter highlights, simply click on any of the tags to apply a filter in the search function. Click on another tag to apply a double filter. And if you'd like to filter on both "creator" and a "tag", simply click a tag followed by a creator for a targeted search.

The reimagined Highlights Library in NEXT is designed to make working with your highlights more efficient and enjoyable. Try it out today and discover how it enhances your NEXT experience!

Our latest update adds a long-awaited feature: search in transcripts. You can now search for any word in your transcript and quickly find relevant topics. No more endless scrolling and wasting time!

Once you've entered your search term, the transcript will highlight all the occurrences of that word. Even better, the karaoke mode will automatically move to that word, so when you hit "play," the audio or video recording will start from that exact spot. And if you want to browse through all the search results, just hit "Enter" on your keyboard, and voila! You can also use the left and right arrows to move to the previous or next word. Try it out and let us know what you think!

Exciting news! We've just launched a new feature that makes it easier to manage SAML users inside NEXT. Admin users can now activate or deactivate both SAML and non-SAML users without leaving NEXT and navigating to the company's active directory.

Simply navigate to the Settings & Members page, go to the "Users" tab, and toggle the switch to "Activate" or "Deactivate" a SAML user. Deactivated users will no longer be able to access NEXT, even if they were added to the Active Directory Group on your company's IT end.

Stay organized and streamline your user management process with this new feature.

Great news! We're always looking for ways to make things easier for our users, and we're happy to announce that Admin users can now set up an SSO connection with NEXT more easily than ever before.

With this new feature, you can find the SSO data directly in NEXT, allowing you to work with your IT team to set up the connection without needing any direct support from us. This makes setting up SSO a breeze and much faster. And if you do need help, we're always here to support you.

When uploading and transcribing a recording, NEXT automatically identifies the correct language. However, strong accents may pose a challenge for AI language recognition, and in those case it may need a little help.

To ensure accurate transcription in such cases, we've introduced a feature that enables you to manually guide the AI by selecting the correct language. Just follow these steps:

1. Go to your recording

2. Click the 3 […] dots below the video player

3. Choose "Re-transcribe recording"

4. Select the correct language from the drop-down menu

5. Allow a few minutes for the transcription process to complete

We've been hard at work improving the speed of NEXT, and we're thrilled to announce some amazing improvements that will make your experience even better.

• Transcription speed for English is now up to 10x faster! Get your transcripts in minutes.

• The time it takes to load the application has been cut in half. Say hello to faster start times!

• Story pages now load 50% faster (±3 seconds). That's lightning speed!

• Opening recordings is now lightning fast. Get your data in a flash.

We're excited to bring you these improvements to make your product discovery process even faster and more efficient. So what are you waiting for? Try out NEXT today and see the speed and power for yourself!

We've simplified the process of creating a new teamspace with a single-click experience. Just click the "Create teamspace" button on the Home page in NEXT, and you're ready to go! If you're feeling adventurous and want to check out our templates, don't worry – they're still available! Just click on the "Templates" button and you can browse our template library to find the perfect fit for your needs.

Sharing key customer moments has never been easier! With the latest update, stories can now be shared with anyone. This includes people within Teamspace, others in your NEXT workspace, and even those who don't have a NEXT account.

To share a story, simply click on "Share" and choose the desired setting:

• "Anyone with the link": Share the story freely, allowing anyone who clicks the link to view it.

• "Anyone with the link and password": Add an extra layer of security by requiring a password for access.

• "Everyone in your NEXT workspace": Limit the story's visibility to those who have access to your NEXT workspace.

• "Anyone in your teamspace": Keep the story exclusive to members of your teamspace.

Share the voice of the customer with anyone and focus on sharing your stories with the right audience. Happy sharing!

You can now easily re-order highlights in your stories to help bring across your message better than ever before. Reorder highlights to create a storyline that resonates with your team and stakeholders and share, share, share!

To use this feature, simply click and hold a highlight, and drag it to the desired position. The new order will be saved automatically, and you can always change it later if you need to. Get creative and start telling your stories your way.

With our latest update we’ve renamed "Projects" to "Teamspaces" – a name that better reflects the ongoing nature of product discovery and research. Typically, a teamspace is created for all the discovery work that a team carries out for a product. But, you can also create a separate teamspace for each product area, epic, or story that you're working on

In NEXT, teamspaces comprise four main components: Recordings, Highlights, Stories, and Boards. Our core features, Recording, Highlights, and Stories, are where you'll be spending most of your time, diving deep into interview analysis and crafting stunning, shareable stories.

We've moved Notes to the “Boards” page, featuring the Kanban layout you know and love, helping you organize your work just the way you want. As your project grows, you can use boards to arrange other work items that don't fit into recordings, highlights, or stories, such as assumptions, requirements, or even adding and organizing prototypes.

We're excited to share that we've launched an all-new navigation experience for NEXT! This improvement helps simplify access to core features like Recordings, Highlights, and Stories.

We've split navigation in two parts:

• Outside-teamspace navigation: We've placed less frequently used navigation options, such as access to other teamspaces, in the left-hand menu, decluttering the interface and allowing for easier navigation.

• Inside-teamspace navigation: By concentrating the core features in the top-header of your teamspace, we've created a more focused experience, ensuring quicker access to Recordings, Highlights, and Stories.

This clear separation of navigation types helps communicate the core features more effectively while maintaining a clean and user-friendly layout.

For first-time users, we've provided a convenient starting point by directing you to the Recordings page upon arrival. Here, you can effortlessly upload and transcribe a recording within minutes.

Go to NEXT to explore the new navigation and share your thoughts 🔥

With our latest update we’re introducing "Stories", which allow you to stitch together multiple highlights into digestible, share-ready videos. Whether you're sharing with teammates via Slack or Microsoft Teams, linking into a presentation, or embedding in backlog items in Jira or Azure DevOps, Stories help you bring the customer into every product decision and team meeting.

Create a story from either the Highlights Library or directly from a Recording. Give it a title, short description, and arrange highlights to build a storyline. Stories can contain one or many highlights and serve many use cases, helping build empathy and make more informed product decisions based on real customer evidence.

Reimagine your product discovery workflow with "Stories" in NEXT and bring the customer voice to every conversation and decision. Try it out today!🚀

We're excited to introduce "Recordings" to NEXT! Say goodbye to poor transcription performance when using notes – with "Recordings", you can upload any audio or video file on the dedicated "Recordings" page and have it transcribed in just minutes.

After transcription, view the recording and transcript in full screen for an immersive experience. This makes it easy to create highlights and analyze the transcript. And with no limit on performance, you can upload longer video transcripts with ease.

Recordings are the rawest form of customer evidence that you can add to NEXT. Use them to create highlights and stories, or share them directly with your team. You can even embed recordings into notes for supporting evidence and easy organization.

Try out "Recordings" in NEXT today and see the benefits for yourself.

With NEXT, bringing the customer into every product decision has never been easier. We're starting 2023 with some major product announcements to help you double down on the customer:

• Projects are now Teamspaces and better reflect the continuous nature of discovery work.

• We're introducing Stories—stitch together highlights into digestible videos that you can share everywhere.

• New navigation elevates Recordings, Highlights, and Stories for easier access.

In other news: highlights now have reels, transcripts are 10x faster/better, transcripts offer karaoke mode and a floating player, and tons more.

Watch this short video to learn more about these changes.

Following along the transcript while listening to your audio or video recording has never been easier! We're introducing karaoke mode, which marks every word in the transcript as you're listening to a recording. Karaoke mode is especially helpful while your highlighting and trying to clip very specific pieces of your interview.

Besides following along, karaoke mode also allows you to control the video via the transcript. You can now click on any word in the transcript and the video or audio recording will jump to that part of the recording instantly – no more scrubbing frantically scrubbing in the scroll bar or video player!

NEXT is announcing AI-based sentiment analysis for audio- and video transcriptions.

From now on, NEXT helps you identify positive or negative emotions in your customer interactions faster than ever before with AI-based sentiment analysis on the speaker level.

Apps that offer sentiment analysis usually analyze the sentiment of an entire interview. Although this may be quite accurate, it doesn't quite capture the varying sentiments for different parts of an interview or usability test. At NEXT, we do things a little different. Instead of analyzing the whole document, we analyze sentiment for each speaker section in your transcript. This higher level of detailed analysis allows for a much better identification of unmet customer needs and aspirations in the interview.

Each answer to a question you asked during an interview is analyzed, broken down and tagged with either positive or negative. The algorithm picks up words and word combinations, calculates positive vs. negative, and surfaces those tags that are >90% likely to be positive/negative with a smiley in the transcript.

Sentiment analysis becomes very useful when synthesizing large amounts of unstructured data like interviews and helps you create shareable highlights and stories faster than ever before

Go to NEXT, upload a recording of a customer interaction and try it out!

Naming speakers in a transcript makes it much easier to follow and interpret the transcript. We just made renaming speakers a lot more intuitive. From now on, you can simply click on a speaker in the transcript (e.g. "Speaker 1") and rename it everywhere at once.

You can also re-assign speakers or add new speakers in case the transcription algorithm didn't pick up all speakers from an interview.

Sharing highlights with your teammates just became a whole lot easier. From now on, simply @-mention someone in who's part of your team in the highlight description. NEXT will automatically send the highlight via email to the person you mentioned. To view the highlight, click "View highlight" in the email.

Sharing highlights helps share relevant insights with your team, share important findings that require a conversation, and build alignment🙌

Over the past months, our users continuously shared with us the need to describe, share and discuss highlights they create in their audio- and video transcripts. They taught us: "Highlights aren't the interpretation of my work, but merely the marking of important text that needs to be interpreted, described, shared, and discussed with the team – this will increase our shared understanding of our users and customers."

We've heard you! That's why today, we're introducing a new concept to highlights, which includes the ability to:

• Describe your highlights
  You can now add meaningful context to the highlights you create, summarize them, and add your personal interpretation. This augments the highlights and makes them ready to share and be consumed by others.

• Tag highlights in context by typing "#" anywhere in the description
  Tagging serves many purposes, such as making highlights easy to find across multiple interviews and creating clusters of relevant topics you're working on. You can now use tags in the context of a description or interpretation of a highlight to give them more meaning.

• Quickly see who created a highlight when
  To initiate a conversation with your team on what you discovered, it's important to know who created a highlight. We now show you a timestamp on the highlight, as well as the name of the creator – take collaboration to the next level.

• Seamlessly add highlights as evidence to another note, or create a new note
  A lot of the work teams do happens inside a note – that is, capture and interpret a user interaction. We just brought the entire value chain of NEXT (capture > interpret > share) inside a single note. Simply click the "..." button on a highlight and choose to add it as evidence to an existing note (e.g. an assumption), or create a new note as to start a cluster of highlights (e.g. an insight).

Many organizations or teams have their own abbreviations, jargon, and terminology. This team- or organization-specific language is sometimes hard for the transcription algorithm to get right.

To improve accuracy and quality of transcripts, even in the toughest of situations, we're introducing the option to add your own vocabulary on a project-level. Simply click the arrow next to your project's name in the header of your project and click "Transcription vocabulary". Here you can add words, abbreviations, jargon and more, which will skew the odds of getting them transcribed correctly in your favor ✨

Product discovery helps teams make better, more informed product decisions and provides the necessary input to build products users love. Many teams who use NEXT for discovery are part of or work closely together with the development team. For the development workflow, these teams typically uses specialized tools such as Jira or GitHub.

From now on, you can easily close the discovery-to-development loop, by feeding all your discovery data directly into the development workflow. Simply create Jira or GitHub issues from a note or highlight in NEXT by clicking the "Share" button. This will add the content of the note or highlight into the issue, which serves as context for the delivery team.

Use cases
There are many use cases for the NEXT x GitHub/Jira integrations. Here are a few to get inspired:

• Create draft user stories in NEXT based on customer insights (e.g. highlights) and create Jira/GitHub issues from these stories with a single click

• Found something interesting in a customer interview? Create a highlight and then create an issues in Jira/GitHub as a follow-up action

Want to know more? Take a look at our Help Center or get in touch!

Highlights are extremely relevant pieces of data that often need to be shared with others in your team. However, sharing just the highlight is not enough. To fully understand the highlight, you'll need the context of the transcript in which it was found.

From now on, you can easily copy a deep link to a highlight (either from within a note or from the highlights lister) and share it with anyone. When sharing, it will create a preview of the highlight if the sharing medium allows (for example in MS Teams or Slack). Once someone in your team clicks it, the note in which the highlight was created will open and it will scroll down to the place in the text where the highlight lives.

Collaborate in real-time with your team on the same note, co-create, co-highlight, and more!

Product discovery involves lots of collaboration, both in real-time and asynchronous. From now on, you can collaborate in real-time in any note in NEXT. Go into a note with your team at the same time to highlight & tag, take notes, and more! Now smoother and faster than ever before 🚀

On top of real-time collaboration, your data is saved in real-time as well! No need to worry about saving notes when leaving your computer for a while – your data will be saved, safe & secure🔒