Crowdsourced market research and survey completion using intelligent conversational assistants

Insights into customer behavior are important for making business decisions. Yet current market research methods, e.g., surveys, multiple-choice questionnaires, etc., are long or complex, and have little or no incentive for customer participation. The quality and coverage of data that results from traditional surveys is sometimes found to be insufficient. This disclosure leverages conversational assistants to conduct market research. At appropriate times, and with user permission, a conversational assistant asks a user questions relating to their everyday purchases, behaviors, or preferences. The questions may be longitudinal, audio-based, location-based, etc. For users that provide permission, user responses can be studied, without use of user-specific identifiers, via statistical techniques for qualitative responses, e.g., word clouds, common themes, sentiment analysis, etc. Per the techniques, qualitative questions that heretofore could only be assessed in small settings such as focus groups can be conducted at the scale of quantitative market research