Pocket Gamer Connects is marking its tenth anniversary this year. As part of those celebrations, it’s essential that we continue to evolve the conference series and the ways in which we communicate with our audience (that’s you).

Gathering attendee feedback is a crucial aspect of event planning, and it’s always part of our post-conference wrap-up. As event hosts, we value our delegates' opinions because they provide insights into the success of our events (and help us plan for the future). By actively seeking honest suggestions and constructive criticism, we can identify areas for improvement. If you’ve been to a Pocket Gamer Connects over the past decade, you’ve no doubt been emailed a form to fill in asking you for input of this sort.

We’ve added a new way to share your thoughts from our next event onwards. We’re partnering with the new service, Voop, so you can instantly share your feedback with us by voice over the phone or web. The Voop service anonymises the feedback, and its powerful AI provides us with actions we can take. The AI service has many potential uses, including taking feedback from gamers on the game they’re playing to feed back quickly to studios.

Voop is a startup that’s still building its user base, and we’re proud to be one of the first companies to partner with them to try it out. Voop was co-founded by Geoff Glendenning, a veteran of the games industry, having been the marketing boss of PlayStation and the man behind the classic Sony console’s UK launch. We hit Geoff Glendenning with a few rapid-fire questions about Voop and what it will do for the Pocket Gamer Connects audience and other communities.

PocketGamer.biz: In a nutshell, what does Voop do?

Glendenning: Voop is a qualitative feedback and research product, which analyses, collates and delivers insights along with action recommendations, in real time, onto a customisable dashboard. That could be text data from CSAT surveys, social media listening and research, or live voice or text data from a question link, which can be created in seconds, and dropped into any online platform, emailed to customers, or via an in-game API.

Voop understands 52 languages, age range, gender, sentiment, and the emotional context of a voice response. It's 100% anonymous, doesn't require any download and takes no personal data.

What AI model or technology are you using?

Voop is LLM agnostic and uses proprietary models for its voice analysis. The current iteration uses Open AI’s GPT-4 models due to these being the most suitable at this time. However, the team is constantly assessing LLMs and their capabilities and GPT-4 is likely to be combined with other smaller more specialised models in the future.

What are the limitations of traditional customer survey methods that AI helps overcome?

Traditional research methods, in particular CSAT surveys, take time to fill in, have a slow and low response rate; then an in-house researcher might spend a month manually analysing about 30% of the text data received, before deciding on the key insights, actions and writing a report.

Voop can process all the live data from a linked question in real time. Or, for example, if a client has 10k text responses from one of their current channels, we can have that processed with the insights and action delivered within an hour or two.

So basically it's faster, cheaper and delivers more honest and accurate responses and insights to support the in-house UX, Research, Development, Marketing, and Management teams to make quicker, more informed decisions.

But that's just supporting clients with their existing methodology; we see a very quick and easy transition into using Voop for what it's best at, which is by enabling voice feedback for CSAT surveys and other channels – feedback is much faster and smoother for player responses.

Who are your target customers? You’re working primarily in games?

Voop is a brilliant product for feedback from communities who are passionate, like gamers, so game developers and publishers are the obvious customers for us to launch our initial product for. Plus my background is 30 years in games and marketing, and I've been a regular gamer since the ZX Spectrum, so I know the market very well from the business side, and as a player.

Sports is another great market for Voop.

However, $100b is spent annually by businesses and organisations to understand what their customers need, want, think and feel, and most of the research methodology hasn't changed in decades until now, so we have an exciting product roadmap from year two which will see Voop expanding into many other markets.

How do you tailor your AI-powered feedback solution to meet the specific needs of different customers?

We contextualise per game, understanding the business vision and mission, particular player personas, competitors, key metrics and risks as well as understanding the short and long term objectives of the business and the research required.

This personalisation is combined with an industry-specific training and a scoring system based around the key metrics, so that every feedback is tagged with the relevant topics from the sentiment.

What’s your current roadmap for the year ahead? When can other people take advantage of Voop?

We are currently in beta and working with a select number of clients on our Early Partner Programme, with a roadmap to launch our initial games product towards the end of Q2 or early Q3.

When you attend this week's Dubai GameExpo Summit powered by Pocket Gamer Connects, look for an email from us that links to a Voop feedback page. Our following conferences are in Helsinki in October and Jordan in November. We are excited by the opportunity to communicate with our event attendees in new ways and hope to evolve the events based on the feedback we receive. Please let us know how you get on with it!