Mic Drop or Data Flop? Evaluating the Fitness for Purpose of AI Voice Interviewers for Data Collection within Quantitative & Qualitative Research Contexts

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tirumala, Shreyas, Jain, Nishant, Leybzon, Danny D., Buskirk, Trent D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908514881896448
author Tirumala, Shreyas
Jain, Nishant
Leybzon, Danny D.
Buskirk, Trent D.
author_facet Tirumala, Shreyas
Jain, Nishant
Leybzon, Danny D.
Buskirk, Trent D.
contents Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for "AI interviewers" that can administer voice-based surveys with respondents in real-time. This position paper reviews emerging evidence to understand when such AI interviewing systems are fit for purpose for collecting data within quantitative and qualitative research contexts. We evaluate the capabilities of AI interviewers as well as current Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems across two dimensions: input/output performance (i.e., speech recognition, answer recording, emotion handling) and verbal reasoning (i.e., ability to probe, clarify, and handle branching logic). Field studies suggest that AI interviewers already exceed IVR capabilities for both quantitative and qualitative data collection, but real-time transcription error rates, limited emotion detection abilities, and uneven follow-up quality indicate that the utility, use and adoption of current AI interviewer technology may be context-dependent for qualitative data collection efforts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_01814
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mic Drop or Data Flop? Evaluating the Fitness for Purpose of AI Voice Interviewers for Data Collection within Quantitative & Qualitative Research Contexts
Tirumala, Shreyas
Jain, Nishant
Leybzon, Danny D.
Buskirk, Trent D.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for "AI interviewers" that can administer voice-based surveys with respondents in real-time. This position paper reviews emerging evidence to understand when such AI interviewing systems are fit for purpose for collecting data within quantitative and qualitative research contexts. We evaluate the capabilities of AI interviewers as well as current Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems across two dimensions: input/output performance (i.e., speech recognition, answer recording, emotion handling) and verbal reasoning (i.e., ability to probe, clarify, and handle branching logic). Field studies suggest that AI interviewers already exceed IVR capabilities for both quantitative and qualitative data collection, but real-time transcription error rates, limited emotion detection abilities, and uneven follow-up quality indicate that the utility, use and adoption of current AI interviewer technology may be context-dependent for qualitative data collection efforts.
title Mic Drop or Data Flop? Evaluating the Fitness for Purpose of AI Voice Interviewers for Data Collection within Quantitative & Qualitative Research Contexts
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01814