Cai helps you categorise open answers quickly and reliably. Cai combines AI with Crowdtech’s research expertise and quality standards. You remain in control: you can review, adjust and further refine the suggested categories and assignments before using the results.
In this article, you’ll learn how open answer categorisation works, how to start a categorisation, and how to review and refine the results.
What is open answer categorisation?
Open answer categorisation is an AI feature that automatically organises open answers to a question in your research into categories. Cai reads a selection of the answers, identifies the main themes and clusters the answers around them. You’ll get an overview of relevant categories, with a name, summary, number of associated answers and example quotes for each category. You can then use the review workspace to see which answer has been assigned to which category and make adjustments yourself. Read more about the review workspace.
Categorisation works best for research with more than 500 answers to the relevant question. With these numbers, Cai can form more reliable and distinctive categories.
Getting started
- Navigate to ‘Cai’ in the left-hand menu, recognisable by the star icon.
- Select the research project for which you want to categorise open answers.
- Select the specific question you want to categorise.
- Start the categorisation.
Cai then randomly selects 500 answers for the initial categorisation. You do not need to select or upload any answers yourself. If you want to categorise additional answers, click the plus icon after the initial categorisation.
The system remembers which question was most recently categorised for each survey environment. This means that if a colleague has already performed a categorisation for a research project, you’ll see those results when you open the same research project. This allows you and your team to build on each other’s work.
Which answers are used?
Before answers reach the AI model, they go through a number of steps to ensure that only useful and informative answers are included:
- Irrelevant answers are excluded. This includes empty answers, answers such as ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘N/A’, answers consisting only of numbers or symbols, and one-letter answers. Answers that have already been categorised are also excluded; only answers that have not yet been categorised are included.
- The number of answers remaining after this filtering is provided to the AI model as context.
- The AI model then filters out answers that are semantically non-informative.
Cai selects the part of an answer that is relevant to the category and displays that fragment. As a result, the answer you see in the categorisation may be shorter than the full answer shown in the results environment.
The category overview
After starting a categorisation, you’ll see an overview of relevant categories. For each category, you’ll see:
- The category name;
- A short summary of the category;
- The number of answers in the category. No total number of answers or respondents across all categories is displayed;
- A number of quotes from the selected answers as examples of what falls within that category.
The review workspace
In the review workspace, you can see how Cai has categorised each individual answer and review and adjust the categorisation.
- In the ‘Answers’ column, you’ll see the selected open answers.
- In the ‘Categories’ column, you’ll see the assigned categories. By default, this is the category selected by Cai, but you can adjust it yourself:
- You can remove an assigned category;
- You can add a new category;
- You can also use bulk actions to assign or remove a category from multiple answers at once.
Each answer has a status:
- Not reviewed: the output has not yet been checked by a user.
- Reviewed: a user has checked the output.
As soon as you manually change a category, the status automatically changes from ‘Not reviewed’ to ‘Reviewed’. If you agree with Cai’s categorisation and do not want to make any changes, click ‘Not reviewed’ to manually change the status to ‘Reviewed’.
These statuses are also useful when multiple colleagues are working on the same categorisation at the same time: you can immediately see which answers have already been checked and which still need attention.
To help you navigate larger datasets, the review workspace offers the following options:
- Search bar: search for a specific answer.
- Filtering: filter answers by category or status.
- Rows per page: choose how many answers are displayed per page, making it easier to navigate.
Managing categories
Under ‘Manage categories’, you can:
- Change the name of a category;
- Delete a category. This is only possible if no open answer is assigned to that category. You must first move all associated answers to another category before you can delete the category;
- View and edit the description of a category.
Greater precision in the results overview
Changes you make in the review workspace are reflected on the categorisation results page. For example, the number of answers per category and the bar charts are updated when you remove an answer from or add an answer to a category.
Would you like to have additional answers categorised after the initial categorisation? First, check the description for each category under ‘Manage categories’.
Cai uses this description as guidance when categorising the next batch of answers. By adjusting the description, you can make a category broader or narrower, allowing you to continuously refine the categorisation as you categorise more answers.
At the moment, it is not yet possible to export or download your customised categorisation. These functionalities will be added at a later stage.
Language
To use open answer categorisation, you must set the platform language to English or Dutch. It is not yet available in French or German.
The categorisation output (category names, summaries and quotes) is displayed in the source language of the survey, provided this is set to Dutch or English. For surveys in other source languages, the output is displayed in English.
Protection of personal data
Personal data (PII) is automatically removed wherever possible before responses reach the AI model. To do this, an external service is used to mask text. When the service identifies text as potentially containing personal data, it is replaced with the label [redacted]. The [redacted] label is not displayed in Cai’s output. The relevant data is filtered out of the text before it is processed by the AI model. Would you like to check which data has been filtered out? The original responses are always available through the Review Workspace, Download Center, and Results.
- In some cases, a word may be incorrectly masked (for example, a word such as ‘employee’), while less common names may sometimes be recognised less accurately.
- We have deliberately chosen a strict setting: we would rather mask slightly more information than risk personal data remaining visible.
This masking takes place before an answer reaches the AI model. For the categorisation itself, we use Mistral, a French AI model that operates under European legislation.
Rights and access
Open answer categorisation is linked to the right ‘Categorisation open answers (LLM)’. If you do not have access to open answer categorisation, check whether this right has been assigned to your account.
Credits and upgrading
Every 90 days, you automatically receive a number of credits that you can use for Cai, including open answer categorisation. If you run out of credits, you can upgrade to a paid package. To do so, contact your Customer Success Manager or email customersuccess@crowdtech.com.