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🔒