[HN Gopher] Show HN: RoundtableJS - Open-source programmatic sur...
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       Show HN: RoundtableJS - Open-source programmatic survey library
        
       Hi HN, we're Matt and Mayank of Roundtable. We're launching
       RoundtableJS, an open-source library
       (https://github.com/roundtableAI/roundtable-js) to program research
       surveys at scale.  Academic and market researchers want a DIY
       platform for survey research. Most existing tools are no-code, and
       these researchers want programmatic software that handles advanced
       branching logic and customization. We know this because we spent
       five years using open-source survey software for our academic work.
       One of the key insights of RoundtableJS is to leverage JavaScript's
       async/await functionality for managing survey logic. In other
       libraries survey logic is determined via callbacks that trigger
       when a page is submitted (i.e., if the user answers "Yes" to Q2,
       show page 3), which quickly becomes a nightmare to manage and
       debug. Our library lets developers build the timeline in an async
       function which means the logic flows intuitively from top to
       bottom.  However, this fully programmable logic can be inaccessible
       to non-developers, and so our cloud offering
       (surveys.roundtable.ai) lets users program surveys using natural
       language by storing the library into context of an LLM (which acts
       as a library-specific copilot, demo link here:
       https://www.loom.com/share/7e7f30aa96244542a62d6c6ed125f2d5?...).
       We think that being open-source will give us an edge in integrating
       LLMs into our platform. We designed RoundtableJS with LLM usage in
       mind, i.e. making it fully customizable and general-purpose. The
       alternative - building a library with a more constrained focus -
       would be more intuitive for unassisted programmers, but AI
       assistance makes it really easy to customize any part of the
       survey. Already we think this approach is easier and faster than
       no-code alternatives.  We left academia last year and have been
       building products in the survey space since. Our first product was
       an AI-powered survey simulator
       (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36865625). People loved
       playing with it, but it was difficult to monetize (as many HN
       comments predicted). We abandoned this, talked to customers, and
       found that data quality is a huge problem in market research (e.g.
       https://www.kantar.com/company-news/kantar-partners-with-rea...).
       We released an API that analyzes open-end responses for low quality
       and fraudulent typing behavior. This helps firms save time cleaning
       data, but it is a limited market.  We plan to monetize through our
       cloud offering, which currently offers instant link deployment, an
       interactive code editor and a fraud detection suite. We plan to
       introduce more features here in the analytics, design, and
       productivity space.  Surveys are ubiquitous, but they are often
       bland and generic. By allowing people to fully customize them for
       today's distribution channels, we want to make it easy to design
       better, more engaging surveys.  We just launched. Where can we
       improve?
        
       Author : timshell
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2024-08-08 16:13 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | timshell wrote:
       | Cloud editor open access for today at surveys.roundtable.ai.
       | 
       | Username: show-hn@news.ycombinator.com PW: Hackernews2024!
        
       | jeanlucas wrote:
       | Great. We really need more open source tools for surveying and
       | forms.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | lovely, congrats on launching! i guess at the limit this is a
       | qualtrics competitor? and before that i guess google forms. can i
       | use this as a strict google forms replacement? - dump data
       | straight into a google spreadsheet?
       | 
       | i liked
       | https://roundtable.ai/survey/9593255a3aa7231051e75e578747eae...
       | as a multistep option
       | 
       | good luck - i think its an important problem but idk if its
       | venture scale yet. you might explore RLHF/AI data annotation as a
       | usecase.
       | 
       | i'd be most concerned about botting and filtering out low effort
       | surveys - the latter i imagine is a big academic concern. if you
       | came out with a singular innovation there you could probably
       | build a company around it.
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-08 23:01 UTC)