Market researchers record more IDIs, TDIs and focus groups than ever, and most of that fieldwork now passes through AI transcription before anyone codes a word. Feature pages all promise high accuracy, but a real group session, with six voices, crosstalk and names the software has never heard, is a different test. This guide puts seven popular tools through the same focus group recording and scores what matters to researchers: who said what, whether names survive, and which mistakes would end up as the wrong verbatim in a client report.

Brand teams often book focus groups because the last project used them, and academic researchers often default to interviews because their supervisor did. Those habits work most of the time, but they also produce studies where the method quietly works against the question, like a concept test run as twelve separate interviews where nobody reacts to anybody, or a study of a private health decision held in a room of strangers.

A moderator finishes the last group of a concept test at 9 p.m., the client wants a topline by morning, and the fastest option on her laptop is a free AI transcription app she uses for her own calls. Forty minutes later she has a transcript. She also has a recording of an unreleased product, the client's internal code name, and eight participants' first names sitting on a server the agency has never reviewed, under terms of service nobody at the agency has read. Nothing about that moment feels like a breach, which is why it is so easy to miss.