Product update: Theme Summarizer

We’ve upgraded Thematic’s Theme Summarizer feature. It’s now powered by generative AI, so you can get an instant understanding of any theme in your data!

When users review analyzed customer feedback, they often ask “What does this theme mean?” “What specifically do people say?”

People want to understand the gist without having to read all the comments.

Last year, we shipped sentence clusters. Each cluster shows a different aspect of a theme.

But with the advances in Generative AI, we can go further. Large language models (or LLMs) like GPT-4 (the same LLM that powers ChatGPT) can create easily readable summaries of each theme. The only problem is that they tend to BS (pardon our French).

When you are making decisions based on data, there’s no room for BS. Accuracy and trust in insights is paramount. So, we worked hard and figured out how to leverage Thematic proprietary AI to create guardrails for LLMs. Now we can guarantee a summary that’s not just readable, but also accurate. Here are a few examples:

The Theme Summarizer window also provides quick snapshots of volume, sentiment, and trends for the selected theme.

Sentence clusters remain in place, so you can see customer verbatims grouped by similarity. This means you can pull relevant examples to get further context, and for reporting purposes.

You can expand each sentence summary to read all the grouped sentences. If you want to see the context for a sentence, just click it to see the full comment it comes from.

You can summarize any base theme or sub-theme. And once filters are in play, Theme Summarizer becomes your insights superpower! It enables you to ask specific questions of the data and get instant answers.

As one of our customers says:

"Can I just say that I am loving the summary. Working extremely well and giving me great insights so far! Saved so much time on my report."

Example: How to use Theme Summarizer effectively

Imagine your product is a social media app. You want to know what to focus on next.

1. Filter by impact. You can see that the base theme ‘features and functionality’ is pulling your score down, and ‘notifications’ is the sub-theme with the most volume.
2. Look at the Theme Summarizer window. It gives you instant detail about what’s happening with notifications:

You can see the overall volume of the ‘notifications’ sub-theme, and that sentiment is mostly negative. Both volume and impact are trending upwards, but changing a lot. This gives you a solid overview of the sub-theme, as well as indicating where to investigate further, and what to keep an eye on!

1. Filter by Issues. This concentrates feedback on issues in the feedback. And Theme Summarizer keeps up.

Now you can see a more focused summary of notifications, where issues have been reported.

Want to quickly capture this and send it on to a team member? Hover over the summary and click on ‘Copy summary’ - then paste it wherever needed.

Use any of Thematic’s filters to hone in on the issues that matter to you. Summaries are generated on live data, so you can count on it to be accurate and up to date with incoming feedback or your most recent upload.

How does it work?

Generative AI is all the rage right now, but here at Thematic we’re continually working on ways to help you get insight from your data. So we haven’t simply plugged Large Language Models (LLMs) into Thematic.

Instead, the existing rules and guardrails within Thematic’s model guide the LLMs to generate helpful, accurate summaries. It’s our existing knowledge of themes in feedback that makes Generative AI so powerful and useful.

This means it’s not subject to ‘hallucinations’ - the output is tied to your data. Generated summaries will always be consistent with what is in your data.

Even better, you can always see the comments that relate to the theme and applied filters. So you can always access real-world examples of issues, offering trust and transparency.

Theme Summarizer is free to all users while in beta, as we gather feedback.

Take a look the next time you log in to Thematic, and enjoy instant understanding of themes in your data! Feel free to reach out to Thematic at any time for assistance.

And don’t forget - you can leave feedback on this feature and ask questions about it in our LinkedIn group!