Turning customer conversations into insights does not need to be slow. In Aha! Discovery, you can quickly capture key learnings, quotes, and answers as structured highlights directly from an interview's transcript. Then, organize them with tags and link them to upcoming work so decisions reflect actual feedback. Use AI to speed identification or highlight text yourself when you want more control. Either way, you build a durable research record the team can trust and revisit as strategy evolves.
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Overview
Highlights are key learnings, quotes, and answers captured from an interview transcript: the customer's voice in their own words. Apply them to validate product plans and prioritize the most important needs. Capture highlights manually or use the AI assistant to suggest candidates.
You need a transcript to create highlights. Upload a VTT file from your meeting service to add a transcript to an Aha! Discovery interview. If a transcript is not available, upload a video or audio file and use the AI assistant to transcribe it. You can begin capturing highlights when the transcription is complete.
Highlights you capture appear in the Highlights side panel to the right of a transcript. You can filter the panel by highlight type to see specific details.
Highlights toolbar
The highlights toolbar appears when you highlight text in a transcript. It offers several options for capturing key insights, organizing them, and linking them to your product strategy:
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AI summary Use AI to summarize the highlighted text |
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Learning Distill what you learned from what a customer told you during the interview. This can be a core customer need, problem, or behavior observed in the conversation. |
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Quote Capture what an interview participant said in their own words |
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Response Identify the responses to your interview questions, then select the question from the study's script to link it to |
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Tag Add labels for a flexible way to organize or categorize key information. Adding a tag saves the highlight as a quote and adds the tag to it. You can use tags to organize and report on highlights. |
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Record link Link text in a transcript to a specific record in your Aha! Roadmaps or Aha! Ideas account. If you are using Aha! Discovery as a standalone product, you will not have this option. |
Save highlights manually
Open an interview's details.
Highlight text in the transcript where you want to point out a specific insight. Then, select a highlight type from the toolbar.
The highlight saves to the Highlights side panel. If the highlight is a Learning, you will add a title and description to distill what you learned. You can tag any highlight or link it to an Aha! record from the Highlights side panel.
Capture highlights with the AI assistant
Get a head start on transcript analysis with help from the AI assistant (available in Aha! Discovery Advanced). Use it to summarize a transcript, analyze a participant's sentiment, identify key customer quotes, and identify learnings.
Select the AI assistant menu at the top of the interview's Details view.
Select Learnings, Quotes, or Responses to identify highlights and add them to the side panel. (There are other options in this menu as well — learn more about them in our AI-assisted transcript analysis article.)
Highlights uncovered by AI will display in the right Highlights side panel. Each of them will indicate that they were generated by AI. From here, you can click Save to keep a highlight or Delete to remove it.
Link highlights to Aha! records
Once you have captured highlights, you can link them directly to records in Aha! Roadmaps or Aha! Ideas. Highlights linked to Aha! records will be listed on an Aha! record's Research tab.
Hover your mouse over a highlight in your Highlights side panel.
When the Aha! icon appears in the upper right, click to Link to an Aha! record.
Search for the record you want to link to using the search bar.
Click the + icon next to every record you want to link to the highlight. Then, click Link to record.
https://aha-videos.wistia.com/medias/7fv6ag9wfu
Report on highlights
Capturing highlights is just the first step — analyzing them is where the real insights take shape. There are several ways you can report on highlights to surface themes across interviews and quantify how often needs arise:
Pull highlights into a study or interview-focused insights report.
See a concatenated view of all highlights across all interviews and studies in the highlights list report. From here, you can add highlights to a whiteboard to visualize them in different ways.