Think Aloud

ReVISit has integrated audio recording and audio playback for conducting in-person or crowdsourced think-aloud studies. Audio is only recorded while using Firebase or Supabase storage, and will not activate if using local storage.

Turning on audio recording

Turning on audio recording for your entire study can be done by setting the recordAudio flag in the uiConfig section of your config file.

public/study-name/config.json

"uiConfig": {
    "recordAudio": true
}

By default, this will record audio for every task in the study. However, we recommend only recording audio for tasks which you plan on later analyzing, and turning it off for tasks such as consent forms and introductions. Each component can turn off audio for that component by setting the recordAudio flag within the component to false, as shown below.

public/example-brush-interactions/config.json

"introduction": {
    "type": "markdown",
    "path": "example-brush-interactions/assets/introduction.md",
    "recordAudio": false,
    "response": [
        {
            "id": "prolificId",
            "prompt": "Please enter your Prolific ID",
            "location": "belowStimulus",
            "type": "shortText",
            "placeholder": "Prolific ID",
            "paramCapture": "PROLIFIC_PID"
        }
    ]
},

Audio is recorded via browser, and participants will receive a permissions request from their browser to access their microphone. If they do not have a microphone or failed to grant permissions, they will not be automatically stopped from continuing the study. However, for this purpose we provide the mic-check library, which requires participants to have a functioning microphone to continue the study. You can find more information in the reVISit libraries.

Click-to-record

The clickToRecord option enables a click-and-hold microphone button instead of continuous recording. When enabled, audio is muted by default and is recorded only while the button is held. When disabled, recording starts immediately and can be paused or resumed via the microphone button. You can set "clickToRecord": true in uiConfig for the whole study or at the individual component level.

Downloading audio

All audio data is stored in Firebase or Supabase storage. To listen to participants' audio after they have completed a study, navigate to the Participant Replay view in analysis.

To download audio data after completing a study, navigate to Participant View in analysis.

info

To download the audio and transcript files in bulk from Firebase, navigate to your Firebase storage to find your appspot name, then run the command gsutil -m cp -r gs://my-bucket/studyName/audio.