VIVA Studio lets you run studies where participants talk to an AI — set up as easily as an online survey. Pick a call interface, choose a voice, define your conditions, and share a link. Point-and-click all the way: no coding, and nothing to install for you or your participants.
VIVA Studio is built for social scientists — marketing, management, psychology — who want to study how people talk to AI without becoming programmers along the way. If you can set up an online survey, you can run a VIVA Studio study.
Four guided steps, just like building a survey — from consent page to shareable participant link in one sitting. No code, no installs, no ticket to your IT department.
Use the latest voice models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic or ElevenLabs — and switch between them with a click, so you can compare providers instead of marrying one.
Raise or lower the pitch, speed it up or slow it down — the same AI can sound like a different persona in every condition.
Define as many experimental conditions as your design needs — participants are assigned automatically, or forced via the study link.
Send participants over from Qualtrics or Prolific and back again — IDs and any other variables travel along automatically. See how ↓
Pick a pre-designed call screen and adjust colors, text and layout in a point-and-click editor. See the interfaces ↓
Describe the look you want in plain words and the built-in assistant restyles the interface for you — no design skills needed.
Transcripts, recordings, call durations and URL variables — one click away, formatted for R, SPSS, Stata or Python.
Participants' transcripts and recordings are sealed on their device and unlocked with your personal key — end-to-end with most model setups. During the conversation itself, speech is processed by the AI provider you selected. More on security ↓
The study manager walks you through the same four steps for every project — each one previews exactly what your participants will see. If you can build a survey, you can do this.
Name your study, define experimental conditions, and write the welcome, consent and end-of-call pages with a familiar rich-text editor.
Pick a template, adjust instructions, timers and post-call questions — or restyle it with the visual editor and AI assistant.
Select a voice model, give it instructions per condition, pick its voice — and shift pitch or speed if the voice itself is your treatment.
Share the participant link, pipe in IDs from your panel or survey tool, and watch transcripts and recordings arrive — securely stored.
Two ways to get participants on the call. Both take minutes to set up — pick what fits your study.
Drop the call into your existing survey as a question block. Participants talk to the AI without ever leaving Qualtrics — and the call is linked to their survey responses automatically.
Prefer it separate? Share the study link on its own — through Prolific, e-mail or a QR code — and send participants back with a completion code when the call ends.
Every study starts from a ready-made interface — pick the framing that fits your research question, then make it yours. These are live previews of the built-in templates, just without the calling part.
A familiar smartphone call screen — the safe default when your study frames the AI as a phone call.
The spoken conversation appears as readable text in real time — ideal when reading along matters.
A meeting-style window with an avatar tile and speaking indicator — no camera involved, for you or them.
Every template is a starting point. Change colors, text and layout in the visual editor, or ask the AI design assistant — and instructions, timers and post-call questions come along.
Voice data is sensitive. VIVA Studio treats it that way by default — encryption is always on, not an optional checkbox.
During the call itself, speech is processed by the AI provider you selected — choose the provider that fits your ethics protocol. (Under the hood: RSA-2048 + AES-256-GCM.)
VIVA Studio grew out of our own studies on how consumers talk to AI — and out of frustration with how much engineering stood between a good research idea and a running voice study.
We're glad it's useful! Please cite the platform so other researchers can find it — and so we can keep justifying the time we put into it. A methods paper is in preparation; the reference will be updated once it is published.
Becker, M., Holthöwer, J., & Wentzel, D. (2026). VIVA Studio: An open-source platform for conducting voice-AI research [Computer software]. https://github.com/voicelab
RIS imports directly into EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley and Citavi.
Download VIVA Studio, upload it to your server, and run your first voice-AI study today — your participants already know how to answer a phone call.