How do I choose between different types of AI analysis on Marvin?

AI is integrated across Marvin to help you with each step of your research workflow. These are some of the AI tools you can use to analyze your data:

In this article, we'll cover the differences between each and recommend when to use them.

Ask AI is a great way to surface specific insights across your repository. You can use it to quickly pinpoint information within a file, project, or across projects. For example, “How did company X discover our product?”

You can also use it as a starting point to develop a hypothesis. For example, you may ask, “Make a list of use cases for our product that participants have mentioned on calls”. Here you may apply a filter for types of users and within a fixed time period. The Ask AI results can help you begin looking in the right places. You can search for notes, quotes, files, and participants with Ask AI.

In Standard mode, Ask AI research agents scan your entire repository but generates a quicker response to your research questions.

You can use it for the majority of everyday queries, such as identifying themes, searching for quote retrieval, summarizing information, or conducting discovery on a topic.

Marvin will help you identify starting points for your research. Check the linked sources to read notes, files, and view clips from interviews to gain deeper insights. You can also ask follow-up questions to focus on specific details. Most questions on Standard mode are answered in 2-4 minutes.

When you have a more complex question, you can switch to Advanced mode.

Advanced mode on Ask AI runs more iterations with more research agents to help you answer complex questions. We recommend you use this when you need an in-depth answer. Most questions on Advanced mode are answered in 5-10 minutes.

The additional iterations help research agents scan more of your customer knowledge to generate comprehensive, evidence-backed answers.

Every response links directly to your interview transcripts, support tickets, sales calls, notes, and documents, so you can verify everything yourself.

If you need to analyze files in depth, we recommend you use Deep Research or synthesize notes on the Analyze page.

The Analysis tab in each project is a place for you to synthesize your notes, run Deep Research, and create boards. After you’ve annotated files in your project, you can access all of them together on this tab. You can arrange these by question and file as well.

We recommend using Analyze notes when you’ve already highlighted the key information in each file. Filter notes by project, label, sentiment, etc. to group and locate relevant notes easily.

You’ll also find an Ask AI function on the Analyze page. It works only on the notes you select to help you summarize, surface insights, and spot trends.

Use Deep Research when you need to directly extract insights from raw data. Marvin can analyze files that you haven’t annotated and evaluate them in depth within certain frameworks. This includes thematic analysis, quantified analysis, arranging information in Q&A tables, etc. You’ll get detailed insights from each file you run through Deep Research.

Learn about best practices to run Deep Research queries.

This tab is similar to the Analyze notes page, but it contains notes across all the projects in Marvin to which you have access. Use filters and Ask AI on this tab to find common themes and trends across projects.

Here's a comparison that may help you decide when to use each feature.