Meet Your Respondents Where They Are
Debriefer collects answers across text, voice, and phone — built into every form and component. You choose which channels to enable.
A person in a library types. A person driving speaks. A person on a phone call answers by voice without ever seeing a screen. Debriefer collects answers across all of these, with the same form and the same agent underneath.
One form, multiple channels
The Evolution of the Form established that a field can reason about an answer. Modality is the natural extension: that same intelligent field can capture the answer however the respondent is best placed to give it.
Debriefer supports three channels out of the box:
| Channel | How it works |
|---|---|
| Text | Typed input in a web or embedded form. Always available. |
| Voice | Spoken input captured by the browser or a native app. Text is still available simultaneously. |
| Phone | An outbound or inbound call. The agent conducts the same interview by voice, with no screen required. |
The agent, the blueprint, and the data model are identical across all three. A respondent who starts in a browser and picks up a phone call later is continuing the same conversation.
You decide which channels are open
Modality is configured by the owner or developer, not chosen by Debriefer. You enable the channels that make sense for your respondents and your use case, and Debriefer routes accordingly.
In the hosted form, set this in the form configuration. In the component library, pass it to the provider:
<DebrieferProvider
config={{
formId,
sessionToken,
modalities: ["text", "voice"],
defaultModality: "text",
}}
>
<Form />
</DebrieferProvider>A respondent only ever sees the channels you have enabled. If you enable only text, the voice affordances do not appear. If you enable voice, the mic and speaker are available alongside the text input from the first field.
Voice and text fill the same answer
When voice is enabled, it does not replace text — it extends it. A respondent can type part of an answer and finish it by speaking, or dictate freely and edit by keyboard. The session holds one microphone and one speaker. There is no ambiguity about which field is listening at any moment.
The agent still decides
The channel never changes who decides
Whichever channel an answer arrives through, the agent appraises it and chooses what comes next. A spoken answer and a typed answer are treated identically. The modality changes how input is captured and how responses are presented, never who decides what to ask next. See the form that reasons.