This review is part of a larger series of LinkedIn newsletters titled AI in Market Research: Reviews of AI tools, platforms, and solutions that market researchers should use today.
OpinioAI is a tool that allows you to create synthetic respondents for only $99 a month.
When working with OpinioAI, you begin with the AI persona tab. Here, you can add details such as demographics and personal or professional traits that you believe are relevant to your persona. This includes the “synths” educational level, income level, interests, personality traits, needs/wants, primary motivation, and more.
You can also define which AI model to use for your persona creation efforts. OpinioAI also provides a default model explicitly targeted at developers. This particular model is based on Stack Overflow survey data in addition to other defaults you can set.
You can also create more finely tuned models by uploading your own data. However, you have to format this data appropriately first. Therefore, it’s not as simple as just uploading a text file, but overall, it’s not too challenging.
Other interesting capabilities include:
- The ability to analyze any report you upload for insights.
- Future plans focused on the ability to conduct interviews with multiple “synths” at the same time.
- Support for “synth” driven focus groups.
OpinioAI also links out to several academic studies – an ever-growing list, they state – that highlight the role that synthetic respondents can play in conjunction with market research initiatives – https://www.opinio.ai/academic-research-on-ai-in-synthetic-market-research/
That said, their stated promise that they can “help you get insights from your buyer personas and ICPs without bothering them or spending extra time and money for custom research….” isn’t something I agree with. Ultimately, synthetics will greatly complement traditional research, but any researcher worth their salt will want to include responses from real humans as well.
- Usability = Three Stars; the interface right now is clunky and could use more documentation; it’s entirely usable, but it’s like the Windows version vs. the Mac version, if you get my drift.
- Power = 3 and ½ stars. There is a lot here, but I feel like the upcoming versions OpinioAI will take it to another level.
- Flexibility = Four stars, as you have several different ways to tune your data set, how you interact with personas, how you craft them, etc. Not as much as if you were doing everything with custom code – but if you were, that would cost more than 99.00 a month.
- Cost = Four Stars.
- AI Washing = None.