What is CATI? How Terapage Is Taking AI-Powered CATI and Telephone Research to the Next Level

1 | P a g e AI-Powered Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing CATI: Advancing Contemporary Research Methods Discover how Terapage AI-powered CATI transforms telephone research with adaptive probing, global recruitment, multilingual transcription, scheduling, compliance, and AI analysis. Your organisation operates across multiple regions, each with its own time zone, language, and dialect. You need telephone interviews completed in every one of them within the next six months. The traditional path means hiring regional research teams and local moderators in each market, a process that eats up budget, time, and coordination before a single call is even made. Then your team finds a faster way. AI-powered CATI changes the equation entirely. Platforms like Terapage let you tap into a telephone directory, recruit participants through multiple channels, and deploy AI moderators that speak any language or dialect fluently, all while conducting the deep, probing interviews that used to require a trained human on every call. No regional hiring sprees, no scheduling around time zones, no compromise on the depth of what your organisation is collecting. Table of Contents 1. What Is CATI? Understanding AI-Powered CATI 2. How Terapage Is Taking AI-Powered CATI to the Next Level 3. The Future of Telephone Research Is Conversational2 | P a g e What is CATI? CATI stands for Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing. It is a modern qualitative market research method in which interviewers conduct surveys over the phone while using computer software to guide the questions, record responses in real time, and manage survey logic throughout the interview (Gourlay et al., 2021). Its key characteristics are, 1) A live interviewer speaks with respondents by phone, which allows for clarification, higher completion rates, and reaching people who are not easily surveyed online 2) The interview script and question flow are managed through software, reducing manual errors and speeding up data entry 3) Responses are fed directly into the database, so results can be analysed almost immediately after fieldwork ends 4) It is commonly used for large-scale market research, political polling, customer satisfaction studies, and government or public health surveys. AI-powered CATI (Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing) reimagines the traditional phone survey by replacing the human moderator with intelligent AI agents, enabling faster, enabling faster, more automated, and more efficient telephone data collection. Modern market research platforms like Terapage are no longer applying AI to just one part of the process; they have integrated it into every stage of CATI. AI-powered CATI by Terapage depends on AI to identify and qualify the right respondents during recruitment, conduct adaptive phone interviews that respond naturally to what people say, monitor call quality in real time, and turn raw responses into structured insight almost as soon as fieldwork wraps. That end to end coverage, from recruitment through analysis, is what separates a genuinely AIpowered Terapage platform from other research platform that only automate a single step.3 | P a g e Figure 1: AI-powered CATI interface at Terapage before launch of the Campaign How Terapage is Taking AI-powered CATI and Telephone Market Research to the Next Level Telephone interviews have been a trusted research method for decades. They give researchers something traditional surveys often cannot. A real conversation where participants can explain their experiences, opinions, and motivations in their own words. In our previous article, Old Tricks. New Tools: How AI Is Scaling Traditional Telephone Interviews in Smarter Ways, we explored how AI can modernize traditional telephone interviews. Now, the next step is bringing those capabilities together. Terapage AI-powered CATI combines programmable telephony, AI moderation, participant recruitment, scheduling, consent, recording, transcription, analysis, and reporting in one research ecosystem. The goal is not to replace researchers. It is to give research teams a smarter and more scalable way to conduct telephone research while keeping researchers in control.4 | P a g e Figure 2: Terapage’s AI-Moderated Telephone Interview (CATI) dashboard provides an overview of campaign performance, including participants, total calls, completion and answer rates, average call duration, call outcomes, daily call activity, and overall campaign details. 1. AI-Powered CATI with Adaptive Probing Traditional telephone interviews rely on predefined scripts. Whereas modern CATI are powered by AI based on the principle of Adaptive probing. Researchers can configure interview scripts and define rules for follow-up questions. During the conversation, the AI interviewer can respond to participant answers and probe further when a response requires clarification or deeper exploration (Williams & Ingleby, 2025). This creates a balance between structured research and natural conversation. Instead of asking every participant exactly the same sequence of questions regardless of what they say, the AI interviewer can follow the research framework while adapting the conversation within the rules defined by the researcher.5 | P a g e Figure 3: Terapage’s AI-Moderated Telephone Interview CATI combines structured research with adaptive AI-powered conversations. 2. Recruit Participants from Multiple Sources in One Platform Participant Recruitment is another important parts and parcel of telephone qualitative research. Traditionally, researchers have a participant list as a CSV file, which they upload manually to the computer for research purposes Modern research platform Terapage has entirely eliminated this bottleneck from telephone research process bringing participant recruitment and telephone interviewing into the same workflow. Figure 4: Researchers can easily set up participant recruitment in Terapage by selecting the recruitment option and defining the recruitment objective to identify suitable candidates for the telephone interview.6 | P a g e At Terapage, researchers can recruit participants by  Using participants from an existing study  Uploading CSV files  Importing from large warehouses such as Salesforce, Databricks and Snowflakes. Terapage checks phone number quality, country code, duplicate records, missing numbers and source before calls are queued. Instead of treating recruitment and CATI as separate processes, Terapage integrates both of them within the same research environment. Figure 5: Researchers can select or import participants from multiple sources and bring them directly into an AI-powered telephone interview campaign. 3. Configure the Interviewer for Different Markets Traditional CATI involves human moderators. Modern CATI is AI-powered and uses AI moderators for Calls. Therefore, to reach the global participants, research firms can configure the ai moderators as per their research study and targeted market requirements, At Terapage, researchers can design their AI moderators by configuring,  Voice (Male/Female)  Language (Terapage supports 27 Languages) 7 | P a g e  Accent (British, American, Indian etc.)  Tone (Calm, Professional, Enthusiastic, Formal Informal etc.)  Personality (Empathetic, Professional, Neutral etc.) For example, an interviewer can be configured with a calm and professional tone, an empathetic personality, English (UK), and a British accent. These settings help research teams create a consistent interviewing experience while adapting the interviewer to different regional requirements. Figure 6: Researchers can configure the AI interviewer’s voice, tone, personality, language, and accent, while also setting a consent message to be played at the start of each telephone interview.8 | P a g e Figure 7: Researchers can customize the AI interviewer by selecting the preferred voice, tone, personality, language, and regional accent for a more natural and consistent telephone interview experience. 4. Schedule Telephone Research Globally Managing telephone interviews across multiple regions has become complicated. Mostly, participants are located in different time zones, have different availability, or require multiple call attempts. Managing these details manually slows down research operations. Therefore, Terapage makes global scheduling part of the CATI workflow. Researcher teams can schedule outbound calls, manage campaign activity, and coordinate interviews across regions from a centralized platform. The platform can also help teams track operational metrics such as:  Campaign Time zone  Call Duration  Active Days  Message Costs9 | P a g e This gives research firms greater visibility into both the research and operational performance of their telephone campaigns. Figure 8: Researchers can set quiet hours in Terapage CATI to control when calls are placed and ensure participants are contacted only during appropriate time windows. Figure 9: Terapage CATI makes global call scheduling easier by accounting for different time zones and holidays across countries, helping researchers plan interviews at the right time for each region.10 | P a g e Figure 10: Researchers can configure CATI call flows and rules in Terapage, including pre-call SMS alerts, the number of call attempts, and maximum call duration for each interview campaign. Figure 11: Researchers can set CATI call windows by defining specific days, times, dates, and time zones, making it easier to schedule outbound interviews around participant availability and regional calling hours. 5. Consent-Based Telephone Interviews Scaling telephone research also requires a responsible approach to participant’s consent. Terapage supports consent-based interviews, making it important part of the research workflow before the interview proceeds. This gives participants an opportunity to understand