Twitter, Reddit & TikTok in the comments.

Polly™ was developed at the University of Ottawa to enable researchers to apply university-standard research to social media. That means Polly uses probabilistic sampling in her research. Samples allow us to determine the opinion of a given population based on a properly constructed, representative sample of that population. You can’t survey everyone – so sampling ensures that we have the right mix of demographics (age, gender, ethnicity, income, etc) in high numbers to match the census data of the region, to ensure our results are statistically valid. Check out ASI's peer-reviewed scientific paper on Polly’s sampling techniques.

Polly is GDPR compliant. Polly uses generative text to summarize the different conversation clusters that she finds on your topic. None of the conversations are verbatim and no personal information is attached. Lean more by checking out the doc below.

The summary is written by the AI Polly, using a generative text algorithm

Polly samples from various social media platforms. Currently, she is pulling from Twitter, Reddit and TikTok, and new sites can be added over time. Polly shows you the number of people engaging on your topic – mouse-over any of the items in your report to get an explanation of that feature.

This is why sampling is so important. Other solutions might give keyword searches – you don’t know who is posting them. We ensure we have a proper balance. So, while it’s true there aren’t as many senior citizens on social as young people, we have enough of them to get a representative sample. And while we don’t have your cousin, a proper statistician (which is what Polly is) will make sure she has people like your cousin in the sample. Chances are your cousin wasn’t in the vaccine drug trial either, or the market research that Coke did last week. That doesn’t invalidate the research. There is no such thing as conducting research on everyone. Only on properly sampled populations.

That was true 20 years ago, not today. It is possible for us to have a properly constructed sample on social media back to the year 2012. That means we can also study trends from 2012 to the present day, very accurately. Social media is mainstream. More people are on social media than have landlines. Think of that the next time you commission a phone survey! And mobile surveys don’t have access to postal code data for proper sampling

Write to support@askpolly.ai

Public opinion research aims to understand the attitudes and opinions of the general public, while market research aims to understand the behaviour and preferences of consumers in a particular market or industry.

askpolly can't tell you the future, but she can tell you what is dominating the conversation about an upcoming event which can be a great indication of what might happen!

Are your friends and coworkers public figures? If your answer is no, then she cannot. Polly's top priority is privacy of personally identifiable information, so she does not share any names or locations of individuals in her sample. Polly only gives results to questions (about people) that can be answered by the general public.

ChatGPT is a tool you can produce AI-generated answers to prompts so you can find out facts and information about general knowledge until 2021. This tool was trained on general books, articles and webpages from across the web and can act as a replacement for a Google search (be careful though, there are lots of cases where ChatGPT can make up information so always be sure to fact-check). askpolly's function is much more focused. With her training data being public social media posts up to yesterday, askpolly provides information about how the public is engaging on current events. She uses AI to produce summaries of conversations and to cut down on the time it takes to aggregate the information about your question.

Should this happen, askpolly is prepared to bring in and optimize new forums like Mastodon and Reddit for the same use case. Since his acquisition of the social media platform, Elon Much has stated that Twitter is the "town hall of the 21st century," we are confident that the platform will not dissolve. Polly will always respect the privacy of users who wish to keep their accounts private, but as we watch this space we are seeing that there will always be a "global town hall" where people air out and share their take on what is happening in the world. askpolly is prepared for anything to come.