A few people have asked how Mira actually works in practice, so wanted to write this up.
The full flow from start to finish:
1. Set up your study (5 minutes)
Choose a template Customer Discovery, Concept Testing, UX, Brand Perception, NPS follow-up, and more. Or build your own discussion guide. Mira generates contextual follow-up questions automatically, so you do not need to script every question.
2. Recruit participants (built in)
Access 100M+ participants across 120 countries directly from the platform. Set demographic filters, screener questions, and Mira handles recruitment. No third-party panel needed.
3. Run the AI moderated interview
Participants join via link no app download. Mira moderates the conversation, asks follow-up questions intelligently, and reads facial expressions, voice emotion, and eye gaze in real time during the session. Works on a standard webcam.
4. Get your report (minutes, not days)
Automatic transcript with speaker separation. AI themes, tags, summaries, and key quotes extracted automatically. Emotional signal overlaid on each moment. Full research report generated executive summary, findings, evidence, recommendations.
5. Share and store
AI highlight reels for stakeholders no one watches 40-minute recordings. Everything stored in a searchable research repository. Cross-study intelligence lets you compare findings across multiple projects over time.
The part most people ask about:
The emotional layer runs during the interview not after. So when a participant says "I like it" but their face shows hesitation, Mira catches it and probes deeper in the same conversation. That is the core difference from transcript-only tools.
First study is free this month happy to help anyone set one up. Drop a comment below or book here: https://www.entropik.io/book-dem...
See Mira on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
What type of research are you running? Happy to walk through how Mira would work for your specific use case.
How does the facial coding and eye tracking actually work in practice — is it through a browser plugin, a mobile app, or do participants need special hardware?
Mira
@nkurumak28108 No plugin, no app, no special hardware. Everything runs in the browser; participants just grant access to the webcam and microphone when they join. There is a quick calibration check before the session starts to make sure lighting and camera positioning are good. Works on any standard laptop or desktop webcam.
Mira
Senior Director of Consumer Insights at Decode here.
Speaking as a practitioner, the feature I find most useful day-to-day is AI highlight reels. Instead of asking a stakeholder to watch hours of recordings, Mira clips the moments that matter: where a participant's hesitation revealed unspoken doubt, where genuine excitement came through before they could temper it, where what they said and what their face showed did not match.
Those moments are what change decisions in a review meeting. And they surface in minutes, not days of manual review.
The AI Copilot is the other one worth knowing about: you can ask "which participants mentioned trust concerns?" or "show me everyone who reacted negatively to the pricing slide" across an entire study instantly.
For researchers here, what type of qualitative research do you run most? Happy to walk through how this fits your workflow.
I have to confess I was worried at first because I read "interview" and assumed it was another AI recruitment solution... which opens a huge debate about ethical recruitment and the legislation around automated decision making. However, digging deeper I realise this is actually about user experience feedback... which I guess means there is no reason not to try and capture the "give aways" in terms of facial expressions and pauses etc. There has been some work done around this in the recruitment space (I remember one video platform differentiating between whether a candidate looked to the left or right when answering because it suggested whether they were using the creative or logical part of their brain... as above I think this has now been outlawed in HR processes). But in your space, I think you have the opportunity to get creative and you certainly seem to have done some great work. Best of luck to you.
Mira
@martin_tanner Martin, this is a genuinely important distinction you have drawn, and you are right on both counts.
Facial coding in recruitment is rightly controversial and in many jurisdictions rightly restricted. The core ethical problem is using biometric signals to make high-stakes decisions about people; employment, credit, access, without their meaningful understanding or control. That is a fundamentally different situation from what we do.
In consumer and user research, participants choose to take part, they can stop at any time, and the output of the research does not affect them, it affects product decisions. The emotional signals Mira captures are used to help brands understand how people genuinely respond to products and concepts. No decision is made about them as individuals.
We also do not use facial recognition; we measure expressions, not identity. Participants are anonymous at the analysis level.
You are right that the research space is where this can be done responsibly. That is why we built here. Appreciate you thinking it through properly rather than reacting to the phrase "facial coding."
The facial coding and emotion AI pieces genuinely surprised me, that kind of read on participants usually takes a trained researcher. Watched it pull themes from a test interview in minutes.
Mira
@cal_turkan32795 "That kind of read usually takes a trained researcher" is the most accurate description of what we were trying to automate. The themes in minutes is the time compression — the depth of signal you are working from stays the same.
the facial coding during interviews genuinely caught me off guard, you can actually see the moment a respondent's expression shifts on a tricky question and it ties back to the insight automatically.
Mira
@vedat205337 The "ties back to the insight automatically" is the AI Copilot connecting the emotional moment to the theme it contributed to. You are not just seeing a flag; you are seeing why it mattered in the context of the full study.
Reading how people feel vs what they say is where most user research dies. If the emotion detection is even directionally right, that's a big unlock for solo founders who can't afford research teams.
Mira
@medal411 "Even directionally right" is an honest way to frame it, and that is genuinely where the value sits for a solo founder. You are not running a clinical study. You are trying to know whether the hesitation you sensed in three conversations is real or in your head.
Mira gives you a signal to pressure-test that instinct, faster than you could manually review recordings. First study is free this month if you want to try it on something live.
Tried it on a small concept test and the emotional read from facial coding picked up hesitations I would have totally missed in a regular interview. Insane that it handles recruiting and synthesis in one pass.
Mira
@poyraz853752 The recruiting + synthesis in one pass is one of the things we are most proud of — most tools make you stitch together three or four platforms to get from question to insight. The hesitation catch is exactly where the emotional layer earns its place. That pause before the polished answer is usually the most honest signal in the whole session. Glad it surfaced something useful for your concept test.