AI insights and summaries Premium

Two AI features help with the part of a form that numbers can't: what people actually wrote.

AI insights

At the top of the Insights view, Summarize responses asks AI to read your latest 50 completed responses and write a short report:

• What your responses say: a few sentences on the overall picture.
• Themes: the recurring topics, each with how many responses mention it ("12 of 50 responses") and quotes from them. Select a quote to open the response it came from.
• By question: what people said to each free-text question.
• What you could do: suggestions based on the themes.

It takes about a minute, and you can leave the page while it runs. The report is kept until you ask for a new one, and it says how many newer responses it doesn't include, so you can tell when it's worth running again. Write a new summary replaces it. Anyone who can see the form can read the report; only editors can run it.

A form needs at least 5 completed responses before it can be summarized. Only the latest 50 are read, never your whole history, and duplicates are skipped. The report doesn't follow the Insights date range.

Checked, not trusted

AI can get things wrong, so hootform checks what comes back before showing it:

• A quote is only shown if those words really appear in that response.
• A theme's count is the number of responses hootform could verify behind it, not a number the AI made up.
• Anything that refers to a response or question that doesn't exist is dropped.

Summaries of single responses

For long forms, a summary saves reading every answer. In the response drawer, choose Summarize on the AI summary card to get a headline, a short summary, key points and the respondent's overall sentiment (positive, neutral, negative or mixed). Each key point links to the answer it's about. Rewrite writes it again.

The headline also appears in the table's Summary column. Summarize this page writes summaries for every completed response on the current page that doesn't have one yet.

A summary is kept with the response, since a completed response never changes. Partial responses can't be summarized. Anyone who can read the response can read its summary; only editors can ask for one.

What's sent to the AI, and what isn't

Both features send the questions and the respondent's answers to them, including free text, "Other" text and follow-up replies. They never send:

• Identifying answers: email addresses, phone numbers, contact details, postal addresses, links, dates and times, uploaded files and signatures, and numbers marked as Personal data.
• Consent answers and hidden fields.
• The respondent's browser, the page they came from, or any id. Responses are labelled "r1", "r2" and so on in what's sent, and matched back afterwards.

Reports and summaries quote respondents, so if the form is encrypted, they're encrypted too. A report is deleted whenever the responses it read are, and a summary goes with its response.

There's an hourly limit on runs per organization, to keep costs predictable.