Group responses with AI in modern reports

You can use generative AI to automatically group similar responses.

Note: Smart Grouping is available to all customers as a beta feature. To use this feature, you must opt in to the AI and machine learning capabilities on our platform. For more information, see Enable AI and Machine Learning.

As with any AI tool, Alida AI can make mistakes. Double-check the generated content to make sure it's accurate.

Instead of manually reading through and categorizing short open end or other/specify responses, use the Smart Grouping feature to automatically group similar responses. Smart Grouping uses generative AI to identify groups that exist in your data and associate the relevant responses with each group. This enables you to spend your time analyzing the report data and deriving insights rather than cleaning up and organizing the data.

The results of Smart Grouping are displayed in a crosstab containing categorized groups with counts.

Note: Smart Grouping is not available by default in existing reports created before the feature release date (October 28, 2025). If you add new data tiles for supported question types or Text profile variables to an existing report, the Smart Grouping feature is available.

Smart Grouping automatically categorizes and groups similar open-ended text responses together based on their content and meaning by performing the following analysis:

  • It takes individual text responses and clusters them into thematic groups.
  • It creates groups where similar responses are categorized together.
  • It groups similar responses regardless of language.
  • It accounts for discrepancies in responses, such as misspellings and naming variations.
  • It provides quantitative analysis by showing how many responses fall into each group.
Smart Grouping other/specify answers to a Single Choice question

Your survey includes a single choice question where participants can either choose from a predefined list of retailers or select the Other (Please specify) option and type in their answer. When you review the other/specify responses you can see that the same retailers are listed repeatedly, but that the data is messy. The participants have misspelled the retailer name, used slightly different names for the same retailer, and entered the retailer's name in various different languages. Manually sorting and counting the large number of other/specify answers is impractical.

The other/specify option includes a large number of responses similar to the following:

  • Amzon
  • amazon.ca
  • The Amazon store
  • アマゾン (Amazon in Japanese)
  • Canadian Tire
  • Canadian Tyre
  • Cdn Tire
  • Can-Tire
  • wal mart supercenter
  • Wallmart
  • Wal-Mart
  • walmart.com

You can get the information you need by using the Smart Grouping feature to automatically sort, group, and count the other/specify responses for each retailer.

You can apply banners and filters to tiles that have Smart Grouping enabled. You can also enable Smart Grouping for multiple other/specify answers for a single question.

  1. Open your report and navigate to the single choice question that includes the other/specify answers.
  2. Turn on Smart Grouping and select the appropriate output language for your groups.
  3. View the new other/specify crosstab that displays the identified groups and the count and percentage for each group.
  4. If you are still receiving responses to your survey, refresh the report to include the latest responses, and then click Regenerate Groupings to recreate the groups based on the updated set of answers to the other/specify question.