Topics: How can I get more information out of my open text fields?

Go to Topics ↗ · Opens the webapp — please log in first · Requires the Topics feature Here is a video explaining this feature

​

What is the Topics feature?

Topics is the side menu entry you use to categorise the open text responses from your surveys. Every open response can be assigned to one or more topics — by hand or with the AI assistant — so that individual comments turn into categories you can analyse. The area is split into two tabs: Overview for the responses of the selected survey, and Library for the topics you use again and again. Not to be confused with the Topic Trend Chart: that chart shows how sentiment towards topics you have already assigned develops over time, while here you create the topics and assign the responses to them. 1. Just click on “Topics” in the side menu: Now you can look at the open text responses for each survey. 2. To start off, you need to select your survey and the time period. After selecting a survey, all responses will be shown in the “Uncategorised” section. 3. By clicking on “Open edit mode”, you can create and adjust manually categories for your open text responses. Category names can contain 3 to 100 characters. If you would instead prefer to use AI to assist you, please click here: Just click on an uncategorised response and choose your category or create a new one. Once you leave the edit mode, the categories will be created and the feedback will be shown in the newly created categories. If too few responses are available, you will see this: If the survey doesn’t contain any text fields, you will see this: 4. If you would like to rename your categories, just click on the category and on “Open edit mode”. Right next to the name is a small pencil with which you can rename the category. Once this has been saved, the topic is renamed in the section title and all topic cards on the page. 5. If you want to delete a category, you can click on the small bin, and a pop-up appears to confirm the deletion of the topic. If the user confirms, then the topic is deleted and all assignments from all questions to this topic are removed.

​

All responses that no category longer have a category will be displayed in the category “Uncategorized” again. Clustering topics automatically with the help of AI An even easier way of grouping your topics, is with the use of our beta version of AI clustering. The first 2 steps of this process remain the same as in the manual version above (first selecting the survey you wish to analyse and the period too) but then all you need to do is to click on “Start AI assistant” on the right of every question you would like to have clustered. As this process can take some time (depending on how much feedback needs to be clustered), feel free to close the window and come back to your Honestly account later in the day to see the text responses have been automatically clustered. Just as above, you can still edit the topics created by AI and the title of each category too once the AI clustering process is complete. Category names can contain 3 to 100 characters. You can also remove any categorisation you disagree with by deleting it. If, for any reason, a categorisation of a particular response is not possible, it will remain in the “Uncategorised” section at the very top of the responses.

​

Which surveys and questions does the AI assistant work on?

• Regular surveys only. 360° Feedbacks do not appear in the survey selection under Topics.
• Open text questions only — single-line and multi-line text fields.
• At least one response in the selected period. If a question has no responses, it shows No answers instead of the button.
• Only with a German or English interface. If your profile is set to any other language, the AI assistant cannot be started.

Start AI Assistant for All Questions analyses every open text question in the survey in one go. Questions that already have topic assignments, or are currently being analysed, are skipped.

​

Running the AI assistant again

As soon as a question has topic assignments, the Start AI assistant button is replaced by Reset. Use it to reset the assignments, then start the AI assistant again. Starting it removes all existing topic assignments for that question in the selected period. Your prompts (inputs) and completions (outputs), your embeddings, and your training data:

• are NOT available to other customers.
• are NOT available to OpenAI.
• are NOT used to improve OpenAI models.
• are NOT used to improve any Microsoft or 3rd party products or services.
• are NOT used for automatically improving Azure OpenAI models for your use in your resource (The models are stateless, unless you explicitly fine-tune models with your training data).
• Your fine-tuned Azure OpenAI models are available exclusively for your use.

The Azure OpenAI Service is fully controlled by Microsoft; Microsoft hosts the OpenAI models in Microsoft’s Azure environment and the Service does NOT interact with any services operated by OpenAI (e.g. ChatGPT, or the OpenAI API). Learn more about data, privacy and security for Azure OpenAI Service here. Which user has access to which actions: More about AI-Tools for open text fields: If you want to get even more out of your segmented data, use our sentiment analysis and bubble charts in the dashboards. This allows you to see at a glance which topics are perceived particularly positively or critically by employees, how intensively individual topics are discussed, and where concrete fields for action emerge. The visualizations help you quickly identify patterns and correlations in the comments from the open text fields of your organization’s surveys, set priorities, and plan your next steps based on data. Click here for more information.

​

Translating open-text responses

Open-text responses are not translated automatically. Instead, every response has a Translate link next to it: one click shows the response in the language your Honestly interface is set to. Show Original switches back to the original wording. You will find Translate in these places:

• on the responses in the Topics overview
• on the responses in Text charts on a dashboard
• on the responses that open when you click a topic in the Bubble Chart or the Topic Trend Chart

The link only appears if your account has consented to Microsoft as a subprocessor, because the translation is done by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI models. You grant that consent in the Subprocessors tab in your account settings. The translation is created for your view only and is not saved; the response itself stays unchanged. The print view (PDF) and every other export therefore always contain the original text.

---

​

The Topics Library

For internal company topics that have been standardised, or topics that come up repeatedly, you can use the Topics Library In the library, you can also save topics that were identified by the AI and that you want to reuse in the future. You can find this feature in the side menu under “Topics > Library”. That is where you can also rename and remove your library topics:

​

There are 2 ways to save new topics to the library

Option 1: Go to the library by clicking on this symbol and then click on “Create Topic +” and enter your own topic name Option 2: Go to the topics overview by clicking on this symbol then hover over an existing topic that you would like to save, so that this symbol appears on the right, and click on it: This creates a new topic, which will be prioritised by the AI from now on. All topics in the library are marked with a small library icon, such as this: If the library isn’t visible in your account and would like to enable it, please contact your Customer Success Manager at service@honestly.com.

​

Related articles

• What is the Bubble Chart?
• What is the Topic Trend Chart?
• How can I customise anonymity for open text fields?
• What is data masking and how do I turn it on?
• How is AI used in our software?