Changelog: Enhanced Participant Assignment for Better Transcript Clarity | Dovetail Champions

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Changelog: Enhanced Participant Assignment for Better Transcript Clarity

Dovetail

February 24, 2025

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23 Feb, 2025

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We’ve simplified the participant dropdown in transcripts, making it easier to assign contacts and workspace users without extra clicks. Creating contacts is now more seamless, improving AI-powered summaries and making it clearer who said what. Simply type the name of the speaker and assign the existing contact, or create a new participant. This update strengthens the connection between transcripts and contacts, bringing richer context to your analysis.Read about other improvements and updates in today’s changelog.

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9 comments

Stephanie Pratt
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This is only simplified if you use contacts. Now it's harder to use for those of us who don't use contacts or don't want PII mixed in with our research data since we have to anonymize/delete per our data governance and retention policies. It seems like we're being forced to used contacts.
Emi Fogg
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Seconding Stephanie that there should be a way to add a temporary name that isn't assigned to a contact. PLUS if I've got contributors who aren't trained on editing our contact base, it's going to create junk contacts. Please add back a temporary page-specific name for a speaker
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Maddy
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Thanks for sharing your feedback! We totally hear you on wanting flexibility when working with participant names. Dovetail does intend for participants to be assigned to a contact, as this helps keep data connected across your workspace. However, if your company prefers not to create real contacts due to PII concerns, we recommend either:
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Creating a placeholder contact (e.g, "John Smith" or “Anonymous Kite”) to maintain your workflows while keeping data structured.
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Asking an admin to update permissions in security settings to restrict the use of contacts for certain roles.
The reason we moved away from free-text participant names on a page is to ensure data is better linked throughout the platform. Contacts play a key role in Dovetail’s future as a customer insights hub, with ongoing improvements to the contacts database, CRM integrations, and linking insights across your workspace. That said, we understand this change impacts different teams in different ways. Your feedback is really helpful in shaping how we think about PII needs and how we can improve this update further. We also recognise that not all contributors may be familiar with managing contacts, if there’s anything we can do from a change management perspective (e.g, guidance, settings, or workflows) to help, we’d love to hear your thoughts. We appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences
Emi Fogg
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Thanks for the thoughtful response, saw you've responded to my Customer Support question. Having some way to prevent untrained users who are uploading but haven't leveled up to managing contacts from generating junk is my main concern. We do use the Contact database, and want viewers to be able to see the content, but learning to use dovetail contacts is more of an advanced skill than uploading and tagging transcripts.
Emi Fogg
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Also: There are times that a speaker is staff at our company but isn't a viewer/account holder on our Dovetail account, so they can't be tagged at that moment as a user, and certainly not as a Contact. What are we supposed to do besides leave them as an undefined speaker?
Maddy
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Hi Emi Fogg, If the speaker isn’t a user and you don’t want to add them as a contact, you’ll need to leave them unassigned for now. Out of curiosity, is there a reason you wouldn’t add them as a viewer? Since viewer seats are free, adding them would ensure their contributions are recognised if they engage with Dovetail in the future. We’re also exploring the connection between users and contacts, as there’s often overlap. Even at Dovetail, we have users who act as contacts and vice versa, so we understand the need for more flexibility here. We really appreciate you sharing these use cases with us!
Emi Fogg
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Hi Maddy, everyone in our org has access to Dovetail as a viewer if they sign on, but some folks just never end up logging into the repository for one reason or another. There's also absolutely a hypothetical where there's some person present in a call that's neither an internal user, nor someone we'd want as a contact, and in this case, that means they just don't get a name in that transcript which is rather messy.
Emi Fogg
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As for viewers getting recognition, does that imply there's a feature somewhere where if I check out a user, I can see what transcripts they've been added as a speaker on?
Maddy
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Hey Emi, Right now, you can track where someone has contributed across the platform through search and their user profile page, though we know there’s room to refine this experience. As Dovetail evolves, you’ll eventually be able to see a user’s contributions more clearly with dedicated search filters and a more comprehensive view on their profile. We really appreciate you sharing these nuances 🙌, it’s super helpful as we think about contacts and speaker attribution. We hear you on the need for more flexibility when handling speakers who don’t neatly fit into users or contacts, and we’re keeping this top of mind as we improve these workflows. Thanks again for your insights!
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Changelog: Simplified participant assignment

9 comments