Keep their exact words. And what changed your mind.
Record the interview on your iPhone, talk through what surprised you on the walk back, and Compass keeps the transcript by speaker, the patterns across interviews and the hypotheses you are testing.
Compass Pro starts with a 14-day free trial. For iPhone, iOS 17 or later.
Sound familiar?
The interview ends. The forgetting starts.
Best quote of the interview, and you only wrote down half of it?
Conversation Mode keeps the transcript by speaker, with timestamps you can tap to hear the exact moment again.
Four interviews in, and the pattern is still only in your head?
Insight cards look across your notes for Patterns, Connections and Contradictions, and search by meaning finds "gave up at the download step" when you type "export frustration".
Heard what you hoped to hear?
Say what you expect before the study, and hold it as a belief you are testing. Mark it Validated or Invalidated when the evidence is in.
Your debrief is a phone full of fragments?
Record a two-minute voice memo on the walk back. The Enhanced tab turns it into takeaways, open questions and the people you mentioned.
Nielsen Norman Group advises a short debrief after each research session, to gather the key findings quickly while everyone still remembers them.
How it fits your week
One interview, start to finish
Before
The hypothesis, on record
Say what you expect to hear before the first session. The note keeps it, and Memory can hold it as a belief marked Testing.
Memory10:00
The session
With consent, Conversation Mode records it. The participant, you and the note taker come back as separate speakers, and names stay suggestions until you confirm them.
Conversation Mode11:00
The walk back
A voice memo of what surprised you, while it is fresh. The Enhanced tab lists the takeaways, the open questions and the people you mentioned.
Voice notes15:00
After the fourth session
A Pattern card: three participants describe the download step as the moment they give up.
InsightsEnd of the week
A belief, marked
Two sessions say nobody would pay for scheduled exports. You tap Invalidated on the belief.
Memory
What you would use
What a researcher would use
Interviews by speaker
Speakers separated, names suggested from what was said and confirmed by you, timestamps that jump to the audio, and uncertain turns underlined.
Conversation ModeThe debrief memo
Up to two hours per recording. Long memos get a TL;DR, takeaways and open questions on their own.
Voice notesSynthesis across sessions
Patterns, Connections and Contradictions across a project's notes, each with a suggested action, plus search by meaning across the whole study.
InsightsHypotheses you can check
Beliefs marked Testing, Validated or Invalidated, and an Experiments topic for hypotheses, test design and results.
Memory
Is Compass a fit?
For your own interviews, often. For a formal study, check first.
Compass is a personal notebook built for founders, and its AI reads your notes that way. That suits customer and user research you run yourself. It is not a research platform, and it was not built for human-subjects studies.
Where it fits
- Discovery interviews, usability sessions and expert calls you run in person.
- A voice debrief after each session, written up with takeaways and open questions.
- Patterns and contradictions across a study, and hypotheses you mark as you go.
- A project per study or client, so each keeps its own insights and memory.
Where it does not
- Coding, tagging, affinity mapping or highlight reels across transcripts.
- A shared repository for a research team: one account per person, no shared projects.
- Importing recordings you already have, or recording calls on a computer.
- Studies whose protocol limits where participant data may go.
Where the data goes: recorded conversations are transcribed by AssemblyAI, voice notes are transcribed on Cloudflare Workers AI, and your notes are processed by Anthropic's Claude models to organize them, find insights and draft posts, as the Privacy Policy says. Notes are encrypted at rest. If your study runs under an ethics approval or a data agreement, check that it allows these processors before you record anyone. Read the Privacy Policy.
Good to know
Where Compass stops for a researcher
- Not a qualitative analysis tool: no coding, tagging, affinity maps or highlight reels.
- It records in the room on your iPhone. It cannot import recordings or capture calls on a computer.
- Two hours per recording and 180 minutes of recorded conversation a day. Speaker names are suggestions until you confirm them.
- Chat reads your ten most recent notes; for questions across a whole study, use search.
- Recordings are processed by AssemblyAI and notes by Anthropic, as the Privacy Policy says. Check your protocol before recording participants under an ethics approval.
- iPhone only, iOS 17 or later. Transcription is built for English.
- Compass Pro starts with a 14-day free trial. Without a subscription the app is read-only, and export keeps working.
FAQ
Questions researchers ask
Can I record research interviews?
Yes, in person on your iPhone with Conversation Mode, once the participant has agreed. Speakers are separated, and names are suggestions until you confirm them.
Is Compass a research repository for my team?
No. It is one account per person, with no shared projects and no tagging or coding across transcripts. Export notes as Markdown, JSON or PDF when your team needs the material.
Can I import recordings I already have?
No. Compass transcribes what it records itself.
Where does the audio go?
Recorded conversations are transcribed by AssemblyAI, and notes are processed by Anthropic's Claude models for organizing, insights and drafts, as the Privacy Policy says. Everything is stored encrypted at rest. Check your organization's or ethics board's rules on third-party processors before you record participants.
How long can an interview be?
Up to two hours per recording, and 180 minutes of recorded conversation a day.
Can I use Compass for academic research?
Only if your protocol allows it. Compass was not built for human-subjects studies, and consent forms and ethics approvals often name where data may go. Check before you record anyone.
Keep exploring
The features behind this page
Further reading
Your turn
Every note you don't capture is a pattern you'll never see.
Keep their words, and find the pattern across them.
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