While marketing research has evolved over time, we don’t often see new technologies that turn the industry on its ear. The notion of truly listening to your research introduces a way to connect with it on a level as profound as face-to-face discussions. The method is a conversational analysis platform we’ve developed at inVibe, and the results are actionable insights from voice-based customer feedback and the spoken word. Employing an automated interview process that is then analyzed by advanced machine learning and a team of linguistic experts, inVibe adds a unique layer that can supplement, and even replace traditional research methods.

Judi Profant, Director of Medical Affairs for 

, engaged inVibe to recruit 25 physicians for a research project designed to understand the type of guidance physicians prescribed during a particular course of treatment with their patients. One of the key aspects of the methodology that stood out for Profant was the participation level in the research study.

“We didn't want to ask physicians to come to a research facility. We knew that wouldn't happen,” noted Profant. The reduced burden on respondents – enabling them to participate at a convenient time and in a less cumbersome manner equated to significantly improved participation levels. “All 25 physicians responded to every question they were asked,” she added. “Not a single physician participant hung up before the end of the electronic interview. That was really impressive.”

Ultimately, Profant and her team “were able to capture the information of the patient-physician voice and how they spoke to the patient. It was representative of a physician guidance experience in clinical practice.”

a standardized questionnaire wouldn’t capture whether a physician took a collaborative or a directive approach. But in a voice recording it's abundantly clear whether the physician is being directive and giving clear guidance.

Working with inVibe has given us valuable information that we wouldn't have been able to capture otherwise

Listening: The Newest Competitive Research Advantage

Despite the many human-centered models and social listening capabilities, the healthcare industry still struggles to include the voice of the patient. Organizations need methodologies that reduce key barriers to listening – enabling them to create better products and services that deliver greater human value.

inVibe partnered with Rare Patient Voice to solve this challenge. In 2013, inVibe introduced the first-ever Automated Voice Response (AVR) platform to empower patients, caregivers, and physicians to tell their stories anytime, anywhere, and extract insights through linguistic analysis.

The same year, Rare Patient Voice was established to help patients share their experiences with organizations developing products and services.

These two organizations partnered to provide a way for patients to share their voices while delivering sharper insights, streamlining processes, and reducing costs. Working with the Rare Patient Voice patient panel, inVibe deployed their AVR solution to automatically conduct interviews with over 250 patients and caregivers across 15 diverse therapeutic conditions. The questions were designed to inspire people to share deeply personal stories. Here are a few examples:

What are some perceptions about your condition that make you cringe?

What do you wish people wouldn’t say about your condition?

If you could travel back in time and meet the person you were when you were first diagnosed, what advice would you give?

                                       Download the PDF study 

In less than two weeks, inVibe was able to automatically conduct hundreds of interviews and collect thousands of minutes of voice responses to a series of eight unique questions which evoked interesting and useful emotional content. For example:

Speech emotion recognition (SER) algorithms detected acoustic differences across therapeutic areas such as Cystic Fibrosis, Type I Diabetes, and Sickle Cell Anemia, indicating that even in chronic conditions, patients experience varying levels of engagement (

inVibe’s linguistic experts noted meaningful differences in how patients described “How I Feel,” “What I’ve Learned,” and ultimately, “Who I Am.” These subtle patterns in word choices and intonation can help deepen our understanding of the patient experience as well as explain, and even predict behaviors.

In addition to capturing patient’s responses to thought-provoking questions, inVibe's linguistic experts leverage AI to extract powerful insights from the voice data. You can access all the patient stories that were captured at 

inVibe is a full-service voice research company that helps healthcare organizations generate meaningful evidence and gain actionable insights by unlocking the signals in the human voice. 

Rare Patient Voice, LLC provides patients and caregivers an opportunity to voice their opinions through surveys and interviews to improve medical products and services. RPV has over 100,000 patients across 485 different conditions. 

Reducing Barriers to Amplify the Patient Voice

Hearing is Believing

Here at inVibe, we tend to obsess about the importance of storytelling, and we’re particularly passionate about making sure patient voices are heard.

As inVibe’s Director of Research Kathryn Ticknor noted in 

PharmaVOICE’s 2nd annual Patient Perspectives edition

, “patient stories may be among the most powerful tools for fostering patient-centricity — as well as the most easily misunderstood. In a world where big data is king, we can be quick to dismiss storytelling under the label of ‘anecdotal evidence’ and ‘small sample sizes.’ Yet, as human beings, we are hardwired to respond to narratives at a deeper emotional level than we ever could to a series of numbers.”

And what exactly is behind that hardwiring? What makes stories so sticky?

The power of storytelling comes from its inherently 

 nature. In healthcare, this is in stark contrast to the 

 dynamics of the intake form, exam room, or satisfaction survey. Storytelling is rooted in a uniquely human format that encourages patients and caregivers who may not be fluent in “medicalese” to participate and share more fully and authentically than they otherwise might.

Stories also stick because our brain is built to learn by 

. Humans process emotional stimuli first and foremost through the auditory system. As a result, we react to the 

 faster and more empathetically than we do to written text. Without these cues, the challenges of decoding and correctly understanding natural language multiply — as do the potential traps for brand decision-making. As researchers and marketers strive to be more patient-centric, it is vitally important to move beyond just hearing 

 it is said. In many ways, listening becomes the “System 1” of emotional analytics — helping us to quickly understand a speaker’s intention, mood, and attitude at a deeply human level. By taking time to listen to patient stories, we move from “anecdotal evidence” to a framework for empathy and understanding.

 to find out how inVibe can help you listen better.

The Power of Patient Storytelling

inVibe fielded a mixed-methods survey asking physicians to answer the same set of three questions.

Two sets of responses were recorded from each physician:

First, open-ended, written responses followed by voice recorded, qualitative responses – allowing for fluid, authentic, and more comprehensive captures of respondents’ attitudes, sentiment, and experiences.

When comparing the written responses to the audio transcripts of the voice responses, we found that Gastroenterologists have a lot more to say about etrolizumab and the treatment of ulcerative colitis (UC), using on average over four times more words per response when speaking than they are when writing.

While Gastroenterologists’ written responses express positivity toward etrolizumab and the general prospect of another biologic option for UC – especially with a novel MOA – their spoken responses reveal a more complex and richly detailed view of their awareness, attitudes toward etrolizumab’s potential role and use, and their own treatment decision- making behaviors.

Insights from the voice recordings include Gastroenterologists’ verbal focus on the benefits of etrolizumab’s “gut action,” some hope for first line biologic use, the attractive convenience of subcutaneous administration, andthat vedolizumab adoption may already influence the perception and future use of etrolizumab.

Q: Have you heard about a treatment in development for UC called etrolizumab? It’s a humanized IgG1 MAb targeting the beta 7 integrin subunit that’s currently in phase 3 trials. What have you heard and what are your overall thoughts on this potential new treatment?

Q: If etrolizumab were available on the market today (with FDA approval), would you prescribe this medication to your patients? Why or why not? And if so, which patient types would be ideal candidates?

Q: What are your overall thoughts on the current treatments available for ulcerative colitis? Which medications do you use and why?

We have shared a teaser of our findings, but what inVibe delivers to its clients is even more informative, interactive, and actionable. Along with a comprehensive strategic report of findings and actionable recommendations, clients also have access to an interactive dashboard, which allows them to listen to the audio responses from each participant, along with AI-powered 

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) analytics.

 Just as the research method we choose dictates the type of results we receive, the type of data we collect dictates the quality and depth of insights.

Physician's Voices vs Written Responses

The Difference a Voice Makes

 into your 2021 business strategy can have several immediate and long-term benefits for your organization. In addition to providing a more efficient, effective, and nuanced primary market research solution, voice research also delivers some unique advantages in a pandemic-plagued world where conferences, relationships, and partnerships have all gone virtual.


So, for 2021, we offer you three unique ways that voice research can help your organization stay connected and get ahead by listening better.

What if you could hear exactly what your customers are thinking about your clinical data, product efficacy, and support services?

 In today's remote environment, where companies' face-to-face interactions have been severed with the people who matter most to their business, it's become increasingly difficult to understand what's going on inside your customers' heads.

inVibe’s automated voice research platform can help you collect and analyze meaningful customer feedback about your organization’s data and its competitors— while also providing an authentic barometer of how customers think and feel.

In the absence of in-person meetings and conferences, voice can also be the bridge you need to make the most out of your remote collaborations with buyers, physicians, and others within the healthcare ecosystem that fuels your business. Analyzing voice responses from your customers can provide you with actionable and meaningful insights that other data collection methods lack. So if you are looking to gather precise and nuanced responses from the people that matter the most, tap into the voice of health.

The best way to predict the future of your business is to take a proactive tracking approach by listening early and often. inVibe's voice research platform can give you unique insights into 

indicators that affect your products’ development, distribution, and consumption and track changes in emotional cues from customers over time.


Standardized, recurrent voice-tracking can provide your company with multidimensional data insights that explain, predict, and analyze your customers' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Early tracking of emotional trends through voice will give your company decision-making confidence while the competition will be second-guessing themselves.

Whether your company is working with internal or external stakeholders, one of the primary benefits of voice research is that it is 

. Voice breaks through the barriers of complex healthcare ecosystems and helps companies extract the most value out of their relationships with customers 

Advocates, patients, physicians, caregivers, sales teams, advisors, employees, and anyone with crucial insights about your company and products can help you supplement your data with their voice feedback, either on-demand or throughout the year. Voice is new, fresh, and human — and it opens the pathways for companies to rapidly and efficiently tap into their internal and external brain trust. When you listen to what makes those close to your company excited or concerned, you position yourself to be a part of their story and learn what needs your organization can meet before anyone else does.

inVibe's voice-powered market research platform helps life science companies capture deep, emotional insights by leveraging linguistic experts and artificial intelligence to measure message resonance, test creative campaign concepts, and map customers' lexicon landscape — helping inform communication at all stages of the product life cycle.

It's time to kick-off 2021. It's time to rethink how we connect with all those that matter to us. 

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 3 Things You Can Start Doing Now 

Voice Research

With the year that many felt would never end finally drawing to a close, pundits from all industries will pounce on the opportunity to make obligatory pronouncements intended to tie the year up with a bow, designed to lure readers from hyperbole-rich headlines to underwhelming narratives in an effort to try to end a bleak 2020 on a high note.

However, I do stand by the proclamation in the headline. This was indeed 

, but not because there are now over 4.2 billion digital 

-assistants in the world, or because almost 160 million people made sure their 

 were heard in the 2020 presidential election — but because now, more than ever before, 

. People need to believe that what they think and say matters. People want to know that institutions, the government, politicians, their friends, colleagues, companies, and brands are listening to them. After all, it’s their voice that connects them to the world.

But if no one is listening, does our voice really matter

? Would Shakespeare’s Macbeth be right in saying that our life is nothing more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? I beg to differ. Because if our life is indeed 

, be it a furious scream or a faint sigh, then it does indeed have great significance. Not because I say it does, but because the moment you hear those utterances emanate from a fellow human being, your heart and mind sync up with theirs, and you are able to feel them greatly and understand them deeply. The human voice has the power to connect us, inspire us, heal us, and transform us.

I have personally seen the profound significance of voice in the seven years since founding 

. By listening to thousands of hours of patient and physician voices and extracting insights from their responses, I have learned how much 

 we say them. This year, in particular, has really underscored this point for all of us.

This year we also heard more clients wanting to listen to the voice of their customers 

. We heard patients and physicians wanting to share more than they ever have, talk for longer periods of time, divulge more intimate insights, and reveal deeper truths about themselves. This year we saw the demand for 

 grow exponentially, spilling beyond standard primary research solutions and into an entirely new world of voice applications. This included peer-to-peer physician portals, rare disease patient communities, and advocacy insight platforms. To keep up with the demand, we grew our staff by 50% and doubled-down our investments in advanced machine learning analytics, clinical-grade voice diagnostics, and linguistic talent that is helping us develop entirely new products and platforms.

2020 has brought us a world of struggle and suffering: for individuals, communities, and companies. Yet through it all, the people’s voice has been an indispensable bastion of progress, a sign of our survival, and a battle cry of equal rights. Perhaps it’s too soon to prognosticate, but I believe 2021 will finally be the year where we open up to the importance of 

 — not just to what is being said, but also to 

 it’s being said. To that end, if you are one of the many organizations looking to recoup the losses of 2020 and setting your organization up for a transformational 2021, I humbly submit this advice: 

A Letter From inVibe’s Founder, Fabio Gratton

The Year of Voice

A few weeks ago, inVibe Labs’ Head of Listening Beth Baldys had the amazing opportunity to present with Tiffani Shovlin from Taiho Oncology at Intellus Worldwide Virtual Summit 2020. In alignment with the conference themes of using new methodologies to better understand and empathize with physicians and patients, the duo co-presented a recent case study where inVibe’s voice research platform was used to do just that.

, inVibe shared how they combined their novel voice-response technology with advanced linguistic analysis tools to help better understand and predict future behaviors of Taiho’s key stakeholders.

When Taiho decided to embark on this research with inVibe, they were preparing for a new product launch, which promised to be an oral treatment for a rare hematologic condition where the only available options to patients involved infusions that were administered five or seven days in a row every month.

“If I had used traditional methodologies to garner healthcare professionals’ perspectives on the product profile,” Tiffani explained, “I would have only heard very clinical responses that focused on the efficacy metrics and adverse event profile.” Instead, she wanted to get better answers to more complex questions, like ‘

What would drive product adoption usage from all stakeholders

How would healthcare professionals perceive the product’s potential quality of life benefits

and do those differ between physicians and nurses

What emotions played the biggest role in their decision-making process

novel automated voice-response interview methodology

, inVibe captured nurses and hematologists sharing their reactions to the product profile — which varied greatly between the two audiences. The acoustic and lexical analysis revealed that nurses had a heightened understanding of and empathy towards the patients’ emotional experience, and as such, they favored the new treatment for more than just its efficacy profile. 

 they said it revealed that they strongly valued the freedom and psychological impact the therapy could have on the patients’ quality of life.

On the other hand, hematologists didn’t appreciate the emotional benefits of the treatment as much and instead focused on its presumed efficacy. Accordingly, their responses showed less lexical and acoustic enthusiasm for the new product. This was also driven by the lower value they placed on the product’s quality of life impact.

All of these findings (and many more) translated into important actionable strategies that the team utilized to prepare for their launch.

Assessing the Market Opportunity for a New Rare Cancer Treatment by Uncovering Linguistic and Emotional Reactions from Hematologists and Nurses

Using Speech Emotion Recognition in Market Research (Case Study)

on June 2020 by Beth Baldys and Tiffani Shovlin.

Can the way healthcare professionals speak reveal their attitude about specific medical treatments?

What if you could evaluate the market opportunity for a rare cancer treatment by decoding the acoustic and linguistic data from hematologists and nurses to understand how they truly feel about an upcoming cancer treatment?

Well, you actually can. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to 

 as they explain how inVibe helped Taiho get rich insights from stakeholders by leveraging their deep listening voice research platform.

 and tap into the world’s top language experts and the industry’s most advanced speech emotion recognition algorithm to get actionable linguistics insights from the spoken word.

Case Study (Recorded Webcast): “Assessing the Market Opportunity for a New Rare Cancer Treatment by Uncovering Linguistic and Emotional Reactions from Hematologists and Nurses"

One of the most valuable tools organizations possess for discussing, developing, and advancing ideas is the good old fashioned workshop. This is where companies bring together multiple stakeholders — internal or external — often in a physical location craftily designed to foster open and rapid idea exchange for dynamic discussions and breakouts that oftentimes span hours, if not days.

So while it’s all but certain that such in-person gatherings will be 

 for the foreseeable future, the critical think-tanking activities businesses use to generate ideas, solve problems, and achieve consensus 

. In fact, one might argue, they are needed now more than ever before.

Participants, guided by a virtual moderator, can review content, digest relevant information, and voice their opinions by simply pressing record and talking.

For years, inVibe has been helping organizations reimagine how they listen to their customers through its voice research platform, enabling healthcare companies to seamlessly and asynchronously share stimuli with physicians, patients, and caregivers and then collect their perspectives through a series of automated interviews guided by virtual moderators.

Essentially, inVibe streamlines the oftentimes tedious, resource-intensive, and logistically-complex task of conducting qualitative interviews so that companies can collect insights from dozens, if not hundreds of participants, in a fraction of the time.

All of the responses are aggregated, transcribed, and made available within hours via an interactive dashboard that offers a powerful search tool to help easily organize the unstructured qualitative data.


So now, in light of the current environment that has forced most activities to go “virtual,” we’ve taken out the ol’ hammer and anvil and given new shape to our tried and true market research instrument. Now companies can use 

 to asynchronously collect insights from internal teams, external partners, advocacy groups, patients, caregivers, physicians, KOLs, and other advisors — before, during, and after “live” meetings.

With inVibe, getting input from your team or advisors is as easy as sending out a link to a password-protected portal where participants, guided by a virtual moderator, can review content, digest relevant information, and have ample time to contemplate a thoughtful response — before simply pressing the record button to voice their opinions.

So whether you want to collect insights from 5 team members, 20 advisors, or 100 members of the global field force, inVibe is here to help.

. We can get you up and running in just a few days.

Reimagining the In-Person Workshop

Medical conferences are starting to go virtual — virtual exhibits, virtual sessions, virtual abstracts, and even virtual happy hours. But one thing that’s virtually impossible to virtualize is understanding what physicians are 

 at a virtual conference without real-world interactions.

But just because you can’t see the emotions on your customers’ faces, doesn’t mean you can’t measure what they’re feeling. At inVibe, we’ve created a 

frictionless qualitative research solution

 that enables companies to understand what their customers are thinking at virtual events simply by listening to what they’re saying.

Analysis of Phase 3 Study Results one year prior to drug approval revealed an extremely high level of interest and excitement by physicians about the product. Twelve months later, first-quarter sales of the approved product were over $215 million for Roche/Genentech.

, inVibe can help you generate meaningful evidence and gain actionable insights by unlocking the signals in the human voice. Here’s how inVibe can help in a virtual conference world:

Gather feedback from physicians on various abstracts shared at a conference

Analyze language to understand exactly what physicians are excited or disappointed about

Measure confidence in physicians when speaking about data presented based on proprietary speech emotion recognition technology

 so we can help you capture, analyze, and understand the real voice of customers in real-time to help inform decisions that matter most to you.

Virtual Conferences. Real Insights.

. And yet, we’re taught to believe emotions are highly 

: Good things make us happy. Bad things make us angry. Scary things make us afraid. Straightforward, right?

So, it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that, as the coronavirus spread throughout the U.S. between January and March — bringing with it increasing levels of illness, death and financial hardship — our speech emotion recognition tools would detect steadily-rising levels of 

Instead, the current crisis triggered some to panic, others to fume, and more than a few to scoff. To make matters more complicated, our analysis revealed not only a 

Which begs the question: why is it that a single, shared global experience such as COVID-19 creates such a diverse spectrum of emotional responses?

 By organizing the people, objects, and ideas that exist around us, we simplify our understanding of the world so that we can more effectively and efficiently grapple with it. Our experiences are processed in similar fashion. When faced with a novel situation, people subconsciously scan their memories for the closest 

The problem, of course, is that most of us have never experienced 

 the current COVID-19 crisis. This novelty throws a significant wrench into our brain’s ability to readily retrieve emotions from its well-categorized index of past experiences. Instead, our brains enter a near-continuous state of “recalculating” — shuffling through multiple past experiences and emotions as it attempts to process the ever-evolving barrage of new information.

"It's Reminding Me of a Plague from the 15th Century."

inVibe’s COVID-19 Voice Tracker research

, we observed respondents actively trying to anchor the coronavirus to anything that was remotely recognizable or relatable. Early on, many people compared and contrasted COVID-19 to the seasonal flu, describing its symptoms either as “worse than” or “not as bad.” Over time, comparisons to other outbreaks began to surface (e.g., H1N1, HIV/AIDs, Ebola, etc.) yet these did not necessarily correlate with an increase in fear, as one might expect. These “reference events” were oftentimes highly dependent on the respondent’s personal association with those experiences.

inVibe’s speech emotion recognition (SER) analysis of research participants’ voice responses plots their emotional reactions on a two-dimensional Valence/Activation chart, where valence represents an individual respondent’s relative “positivity” or “negativity” toward the topic being discussed.

As mentioned earlier, emotion is not a static state. In fact, as the coronavirus has become less and less “novel,” we are able to measure an increased 

 in the emotional reactions individuals exhibit over time. Their language reveals 

 being taken, rather than hesitant or mixed emotions. In addition, opinions expressed previously were frequently reflected upon with mild embarrassment as 

How Longitudinal Voice Tracking Studies Can Help Organizations

Longitudinal Voice Tracking studies allow us to more precisely interpret an individual’s changing landscape of emotional reactions based on both the 

 of the experience. By more precisely understanding how these emotions evolve, organizations can better tailor their communications and interventions over time.

Researchers have come to realize that emotions are primary drivers of behavior, yet there is still a limited understanding of how or why. Social scientists call this the “hot-cold empathy gap”: our tendency to 

 the influence that a visceral, emotional state can have on a person’s decision-making. As our analysis shows, in an unfamiliar situation, our mental models lose all reliable signal.

So what should organizations be doing in these times of heightened emotion and uncertainty?

 Our recommendation: they should harness the power of voice and emotion to better serve their end customers. Here are some things to consider when embarking on a voice research project:

Don’t expect logical reactions to emotional moments

Keep listening as longitudinal data provides a more complete picture of your audience

Develop helpful mental models to guide thinking

Ensure your healthcare “journey maps” take into account an individual’s previous experience — not just the stage they are at in their disease

Enlist the assistance of listening experts

This week’s newsletter is part of inVibe’s “Voice of a Virus” series. We will continue to publish results and findings from our longitudinal voice tracker as we learn more. We are hopeful that the learnings and observations help people contextualize these unprecedented events.

If you would like to learn more or ensure you are on our mailing list please drop us a line at (949) 438–4836 or an email at 

, or better still — let’s Zoom, Skype, Facetime, or Hangout.

We hope you are safe, healthy, and surrounded by care and kindness.

The Value of Longitudinal Voice Tracking Research

In the third week of January 2020, when there were only two reported cases of COVID-19 in the U.S., inVibe decided to embark on a research experiment that involved reaching out to general consumers every week for an indeterminate period of time with four simple questions related to the Coronavirus outbreak.

Like the rest of the world, we were not at all prepared for what was about to come next. As you can imagine, our decision to start collecting data on this topic in January proved to be prescient. While the crisis that continues to unfold is tragic beyond words, we hope that the 

 we are building and the stories we continue to collect can provide valuable insights into how world events and the news play a role in shaping emotions, beliefs, and human behavior.

Every week, for the past ten weeks, inVibe has asked people to share what they 

 they might have for experts. Through inVibe’s 24/7 automated voice-interview platform, people can listen to questions and share their thoughts by talking, from the privacy, comfort, and safety of their own home.

Every week, inVibe analyzed the voice-data through its hybrid approach that involves advanced speech emotion recognition technology and expert language analysis.

What we have learned over the past ten weeks is deeply insightful, often surprising, and sometimes downright concerning.

At the start of this experiment, we listened carefully as most Americans expressed something sociolinguists refer to as “emotional distancing,” a linguistic signature present when people (oftentimes unconsciously) are trying to reduce the negative effect of an event by creating a kind of “cognitive distance” between themselves and the subject matter they are describing. However, just eight weeks later, our analysis of the voice captured a dramatic shift in tone as the news reported a massive increase in the number of diagnosed cases in the country, and nearly every U.S. governor declared a state of emergency.

Social scientists have long known there is a cycle of influence between what we know, how we feel, and the actions we take. As a result, tracking changes in the public’s level of knowledge, emotion, and actions became three key pillars of our analysis. At inVibe, we measure these changes both in the specific words people use, as well as through analysis of the hidden acoustic signals present in our voices that correlate with feelings of control (

). inVibe’s unique hybrid approach to voice-data analysis enables us to provide a deeper level of insight into how consumer knowledge, emotion, and life have changed over time as a result of the unfolding crisis.

KNOWLEDGE: From “What I Think” to “What I Know”

Over the ten weeks that we’ve been collecting data, people’s opinions about COVID-19 have grown significantly stronger and more emotionally charged. This is the natural progression one would expect to see as new and dynamic information transforms into personal beliefs and, in turn, evaluative opinions.

” Fear is now specific and personal — including financial fears and worries of experiencing limited access to essential resources. And yet, not everyone is concerned. A small but vocal minority of people maintain that they do not care. Those people frequently cite the media or “other people” as creating hysteria that is disproportional to the seriousness of the events at hand.

IMPACT: From “Just Handwashing” to “A Whole New World”

In the early weeks, people expressed that COVID-19 had a very low impact on their daily lives. But in Week 7 (March 9–15), we began to see a shift, whereby people began to acknowledge they were taking specific actions and making changes with increased adherence to isolation, prevention, and preparation. By Week 8, most respondents indicated that COVID-19 was 

 impacting their day-to-day lives, and the changes they were making were no longer only by choice.

We will continue to publish our novel longitudinal results as they evolve. We are hopeful that they help people contextualize these unprecedented events.

We have also launched similar inVibe studies with patients, physicians, and other healthcare stakeholders — and plan to publish that data soon too. The world’s healthcare professionals have risen to an occasion for which no one could have prepared them.

The Changing Voice of a Virus: 10-Week Tracking Study (Ongoing)

As humans, voice and listening are two of the oldest and most natural ways by which we express ourselves and our emotions and how we empathize with others. In fact, as we have begun to rely more on text and email as a means of communicating with one another, the cultural phenomenon of emojis exploded. These visual proxies are used to clarify our emotions and illustrate our desire to ensure that our true feelings are communicated. People have realized that when they are not using their voice to communicate, their intent and mood can be lost in the absence of emotional tones, inflections, and other clues within the voice.

If you’re not sure about the importance of voice, think about many times have you read an email or text and misinterpreted the intent.

The study of detecting and interpreting the emotions in our speech is called Speech Emotion Recognition, or SER. It is a field of study only a few decades old but is rapidly growing due to breakthroughs in technology and our understanding of emotions in decision-making. SER has applications in health, education, security, and entertainment.

In market research, SER allows researchers to better understand participants’ emotions through analysis of voice recordings. By measuring how the voice changes in the articulatory process, we are now able to decode the acoustic signals and assign discrete emotions to specific words or phrases that are being uttered.

Facial expressions and biometrics like pulse and skin temperature are also viable options for analysis, but speech offers several unique advantages: (1) ease of data collection; (2) ability to integrate with machine learning, and algorithms; and (3) the ability to analyze the data in combination with other qualitative methodologies to create rich data interpretations.

Acoustic features such as pitch, energy, timing, voice quality, and articulation have a high correlation with underlying emotions. At inVibe Labs, we use validated algorithms to process the voice data and to classify these features into broader categories (e.g. activation, dominance, valence, etc.). Our expert analysts use this data to identify patterns and translate the signals into meaningful emotional insights brands can use to better connect with customers.

The key SER metrics we examine in our analysis are 

. We listen to see if people are interested (

) and whether they are negative or positive (

). While each of these metrics is important in isolation, their relationship with one another is key in helping our experts recognize emotional signals.

In our upcoming posts, we will go deeper into 

 and explore the importance (and art) of 

 to learn how inVibe is helping life science brands unlock customer insights and 

Listening: The Newest Competitive Research Advantage

Hearing is Believing

The Power of Patient Storytelling

The Difference a Voice Makes

Voice Research

The Year of Voice

Using Speech Emotion Recognition in Market Research (Case Study)

Case Study (Recorded Webcast): “Assessing the Market Opportunity for a New Rare Cancer Treatment by Uncovering Linguistic and Emotional Reactions from Hematologists and Nurses"

Reimagining the In-Person Workshop

Virtual Conferences. Real Insights.

The Value of Longitudinal Voice Tracking Research

The Changing Voice of a Virus: 10-Week Tracking Study (Ongoing)

Voice Analysis is Redefining Market Research

The Voice of Love

Healthcare Customer Research 2020: Getting All Emotional

Introducing: reCon

What makes stories stick?

Meet the inVibe team at Intellus 2019

Using AI to Drive Empathy

Talk vs. Text: The Real Voice

Mental Wrestling: The Power of Talking it Out

Hellooo?!

Listening with Purpose in 2019

When the truth is hard to hear

inVibe Labs: Origin Story

Physicians Say Utilization Management Has Gotten Out of Hand

Using Voice Analytics to Measure Emotion in Ad Concept Testing [Case Study]

Healthcare High Class of 2016 Machine Learning Superlatives

Agile, inVibe & The FDA

Intro to InVibe

/voice

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@social

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/voice

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@social

Listening: The Newest Competitive Research Advantage

Hearing is Believing