# Deepa Raghunathan, Independent UX Research Consultant — read of InterviewOS, June 22 2026

> 11 years in UX research, currently running a solo consultancy doing fieldwork for fintech and edtech clients across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Maharashtra. My entire practice runs on Dovetail, Otter.ai, and too many Google Sheets.

## How I got here

I was Googling "qualitative synthesis tool Tamil Kannada" around 11pm after a brutal day of manually tagging 6 hours of focus group recordings from Mysuru. Something I do about once a month when I'm tired enough to hope someone has solved this. A tweet from someone in the Research Ops India community linked to this page saying "finally someone is thinking about this." I clicked. I always click.

## What I clicked first

"Preserves cultural nuance and emotional intent that English-first tools miss." That line. That's the exact sentence I've written in three separate vendor feature requests to Dovetail and NVivo. I've had research participants in Tamil Nadu switch to English mid-sentence because they sensed the interview was being "processed" somehow and they wanted to be understood correctly. This headline speaks to a real thing. I stayed.

## Where I paused

The "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." That stopped me for about two minutes. I had to re-read the whole page. This isn't a product I can buy and use. This is someone selling me the idea of building this product. The pricing at the bottom -- $5 for a dossier, $99-199 for a "code starter" -- that's not what I thought I was looking at. I came here because I have a real workflow problem. I left feeling like I accidentally walked into a business school pitch deck.

## What I distrusted

The scoring section. "59/100 Adoptability. $-22,850 Year-1 take-home (Fermi). 1 in 8 Meaningful-success odds." Who puts negative earnings estimates and 12.5% success odds on their own product homepage? I understand the "honest" positioning but this reads like someone grading their homework in front of me and hoping I find the self-awareness charming. "Financial upside: 2/10" and "pain intensity: 4/10" -- if you yourself think the pain is a 4 out of 10, why did I read a hero headline that told me English-first tools miss something real? These two things don't sit together. Also the "Try it Live result" section apparently exists but I couldn't tell what I was looking at. If there's a live demo, that's the whole argument. Put it front and center.

## What would convince me

If this were a real product I could try: upload one of my Kannada transcripts and show me a synthesis output with at least two actual quotes preserved in Kannada with an English summary beside them. Not a before/after slider with marketing copy. The raw output. If this is an idea marketplace: show me one person who bought the $99 package and shipped even an MVP. One name, one LinkedIn profile, one tweet about their first user. Not a Fermi estimate.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says "synthesis that understands Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada" -- does this mean speech-to-text plus analysis, or are you assuming I come in with a transcript already? Because Otter.ai cannot transcribe Tamil and that's the hard part.
2. "Preserves cultural nuance" is the claim that matters most to me and has zero explanation below it. What does this actually mean in the tool's output? Is it tagging emotional register? Flagging code-switching? Catching idioms that don't translate?
3. You're selling the idea, not the product. Who is the intended builder here -- a researcher-founder like me, or a developer who needs to go find a researcher? Because those are very different packages.

## Verdict: on-the-fence

The pain is real and the language specificity is the most concrete thing I've read on a UX tool homepage in years. But I came looking for something I could use this week, and I found a pitch deck with a $5 entry fee. If there's a real working tool somewhere in here I would pay for it immediately. Right now I don't know if there is one.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-22. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*