What do you like best?
- tagging
- assign "name to all"
- intuitive/simple UI
- annotated output worked extremely well when fed into an ML and later Text Analysis tool
- transcriptions are in the high 90's on some videos, high 80's on others. FYI Trint's transcription is the most accurate I've seen to date but that tool doesn't do what Tetra does.
- price
- they release either weekly or bi-weekly UX focused insights and articles. I'm not certain the frequency just yet.
What do you dislike?
- transcribe editor has a few bugs
- customer service is a little slow but helpful when they're available
- you need to get in touch with CS/the founder to do basic tasks like changing your email address, canceling your account, removing your CC, downgrading from 1 tier to the next etc. These things were all done quickly when asked, like within seconds or minutes but I don't know if this is the same across all time zones.
- intermittent errors, some of which may be unique to only your account. At one point I could not save anything, rendering the service useless. They eventually determined there was some issue with the video asset and since then it's been smooth sailing except for an occasional error message which oddly doesn't impact anything I'm doing nor can I see any issues minor or severe to the performance and controls of the system.
- Sometimes the visual aid loses its place and focus.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I'm not certain if this is a 1:1 Dovetail competitor but it's close and has some unique things to love that Dovetail either doesn't have or I was unable to try within the limited trial window.
Tetra is around the same price point as Amazon's Alexa was when I first used that so I thought and still think it's a good deal for the money. I actually found Tetra after being unable to justify Dovetails $125/mth since there is not department to expense this to nor are my interview needs that consistent where true value can be appreciated.
Tetra does a better job of meeting my budget.
One person on my team pointed out the translation he did in Tetra was not better than Dovetails, of the same video. Dovetail strips out all the ums and ahs, Tetra does not.
Security -
Not sure if the single-page PDF would suffice for some company's privacy, data, and vendor review process. Someone in my core UX workgroup said it seemed "weak", which I translated as potentially too light on details. We take security extremely seriously and the type of data we would be running through Tetra is extremely sensitive.
While this document states all their vendors are SOC 2 compliant, they may want to consider getting a few security certifications and seals to the Tetra name. One of their competitors already does this.
The initial experience wasn't great...give it time, speak to Michael -
I ran into a but early on in my trial and paid subscription and lost faith in the service to the point of canceling said subscription. The problem had rendered it impossible to edit the transcript of the newest video I had to work on analyzing. This was eventually fixed. It's now been a week plus and I haven't ran into any key problems aside from the occasional error notification which as stated before has had zero impact on the work I'm doing.
I'm definitely a fan of the video series they put out and the informational newsletters because they're industry specific.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Having a searchable transcript with tags and metadata is a game-changer for qualitative research.
