Virtual Moderator Now Available in Multiple Languages

June 6, 2011 - PRLog -- Des Moines, Iowa – Technology-based qualitative marketing research company, Quester, has launched the first version of its virtual moderator, Socrates®, in Spanish, French and German languages.

Socrates conducts one-on-one interviews that mimic the conversation a moderator would have with a respondent.  Socrates can be added to quantitative surveys, through the service Quester Inside.  Socrates presents open ended topics and creates a follow up probe in response to the typed answer.  The result is richer stories that provide a deeper understanding of the context of the respondent’s answer. The tool was previously available in English only.  

Socrates in Spanish was tested with respondents in Mexico, along with Spanish speaking respondents in the United States.  The French version of the software was tested in France, and with French speaking Canadians.  The German version of the software was tested with German respondents.  Interviews and transcripts are available on the company’s website by request.  Quester is in the process of conducting linguistic analysis of the data, which will be available in July.  

“Launching Socrates in new languages is a very exciting development for us,” said Quester’s Director of Research, Andrea Joss, who headed the development of the new languages.  “Requests for additional languages have been steadily increasing over the past few years, and we know this will be very helpful to both our global research partners, as well as our global Fortune 500 clients.  It’s something that we’ve worked on for a great deal of time and we are looking forward to continued development of our language capabilities.”  Quester is planning additional languages to be offered in the fall, including work to offer the tool in Asia.  

Quester is privately held and based in Ankeny, IA.  

About Quester
Founded in 1977, Quester is an online qualitative marketing research company headquartered in Ankeny, Iowa.  Using the world’s only virtual moderator, Socrates, Quester assists companies, including retailers, consumer packaged goods companies, financial and pharmaceutical institutions and even small and mid-size businesses by providing solutions to their research goals.  Quester also partners with some of the world’s largest marketing research companies to add qualitative insights within quantitative surveys.  Quester’s linguistic researchers use proprietary text processing tools to identify clear business recommendations based upon customer comments and language.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION CONTACT:
Thatcher Schulte, Vice President:  877.232.1005

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Quester® is an online qualitative marketing research company, who developed Socrates®, the world's only online automated moderator that conducts fully probed one-on-one interviews or is added to quant surveys to probe for more depth and rationale in open-ends.