Chat & Ask (for hosts)

Ask is your interactive deep-dive into a project. You type a question in plain language and dembrane answers from the conversations you’ve collected, pointing back to where each part came from. It doesn’t replace reading transcripts - it helps you find what’s worth reading. The answers come from your participants; the model’s job is to find and organise what they said, with receipts.

The full mechanics live in the canonical Chat & Ask reference.

Run a good deep-dive#

The pattern that works: start broad, then zoom in, then ask for evidence.

1. Click Ask question (or New chat) in your project.
2. Start broad: “What are the main themes?”
3. Zoom in: “What concerns came up about the bus route?”
4. Ask for evidence: “Show me the quotes.”

Each chat is a thread - read the answer, then follow up: “say more about the second point”, “who said that?”, “now just the under-30s”. Old chats stay in your history. This is the right tool for comparing viewpoints, finding quotes, or testing a hunch.

One place to ask#

Ask opens as a home for your chats, with one input: Where would you like to start? Type your question and press Enter, and the assistant gets to work in steps - searching your conversations, reading transcripts, and chaining what it finds to answer harder questions (“find every conversation where someone disagreed with the proposal and tell me why”). Typing in the same bar also filters your earlier chats, so it’s how you find last week’s thread too. A Templates menu inserts a saved prompt.

You watch the assistant’s progress as it works, and Stop replaces Send so you can halt a run mid-way. Answers cite sources by name - “Maria’s conversation” - and each link jumps to the exact spot in the transcript.

The classic chat: Specific Details#

Prefer to pick the conversations yourself? One click on Prefer the old chat? Start a Specific Details chat starts a classic chat: you choose the conversations (one, a few, or all of them) and dembrane answers in one pass with exact quotes and citations from the full transcripts. Reach for this when every answer should come from the same fixed set - say, while drafting a report. If you’re already viewing one conversation when you start, it’s selected for you.

The old Overview mode has been retired: its job - themes and patterns across all your conversations - is now just a question you ask the assistant.

Check the sources#

Every answer links back to the conversations it drew on. Glance at them: they let you check the answer against what people actually said, jump to the transcript for full context, and quote a participant accurately. If an answer feels too neat, open the sources. The transcripts are the truth; the chat is a way in.

Templates and the prompt library#

You don’t have to write every question from scratch. Templates are pre-written prompts for common jobs - pulling out themes, listing concerns, summarising one topic. Built-in ones ship in the chat; you can save your own when you reuse a prompt across projects. There’s also a prompt library with more to copy. Pick one, adjust the wording to your project, send. They’re a starting point, not a cage.

Tips for good questions#

• Ask one thing at a time. “What were the top three concerns?” beats a five-part paragraph.
• Name the scope when it matters: “in the Tuesday sessions, …”.
• Give the project good context - the model uses it as background, so honest, specific context sharpens every answer.
• Check the sources before you act on an answer.

More than analysis#

The assistant does more than answer questions about your data:

• Ask “is anyone recording right now?” and it checks the same live status as the Monitor page.
• Ask “how do I set up verification?” and it answers from this documentation, linking the page it used.
• Ask it to improve your setup and it proposes settings changes - you review and apply each one; it never changes your project by itself.
• If you’re stuck, it can log a question with the dembrane team.

It also remembers: it can save notes about how you like to work and what the project is about, so your next chat starts smarter. You stay in charge of that memory - see and remove your own notes under Settings → Assistant, project notes in project settings, and workspace notes in workspace settings.

What your plan gives you#

If you hit a wall, that’s a tier limit, not a bug. See tiers, billing & usage for how to upgrade.

Related#

• Chat & Ask - feature reference - the canonical how-it-works page.
• Conversations & transcripts - what chat reads, and where sources point.
• Library & analysis - the other way to make sense of a large set of conversations.
• Reports - turn good answers into something you can share.
• Tiers, billing & usage - what each plan unlocks.
• MCP & bring-your-own-LLM - connect your own model on Innovator (coming soon).
• dembrane next - preview features (like the new Ask experience) that aren’t in production yet.