Jun 29, 2026

Cleaner transcript layout

We've refreshed the layout for headlines and transcripts to make them easier to scan. The old dropdown menu is now a toolbar that appears on hover, so actions are one click closer.

Jun 17, 2026

Eureka toolbar and Headlines navigation

The Eureka Insight button in the Player is now a full toolbar: turn any moment in a recording into a note, finding, or quote with a single click. We've also added headline navigation — a clickable table of contents for your session. Bring it up with the H key, by hovering over a headline in the feed, or from the button in the feed header.

Jun 2, 2026

Eureka side panel

Eureka now opens in a side panel in both the Dashboard and Player, so you can chat with it while watching a recording or browsing your projects, no more switching contexts. The side panel replaces the Discover page in the Projects sidebar.

May 29, 2026

Eureka can now see the session

When you click the Insight button from the player, the auto-generated summary now takes into account what's on screen at that point in the recording, not just the transcript. That means summaries can capture things participants show but don't say, like where they clicked or what they were looking at.

May 19, 2026

Multi-language live transcription

Live transcription now works in over 99 languages, with noticeably better quality across the board, and that means AI Moderation now works in those languages too.

Transcription also automatically detects the language being spoken, so even if a round is set to English, participants speaking another language will be transcribed correctly — including mid-sentence switches between languages. Live transcripts stay out of the way by default, but you can turn them on in the player filters; either way, they power AI Moderation behind the scenes.

May 7, 2026

Eureka chat

Meet Eureka, a new chat tab in your dashboard sidebar. Ask it questions about your research, or tell it to do things for you — it can handle almost anything you'd normally do by clicking through the dashboard, like setting up projects or managing rounds.
Unlike Discover, which analyzes a single project, Eureka works across your whole team and can make changes, not just answer questions. Your past conversations are saved in a list, where you can rename or delete them.

Apr 10, 2026

AI Moderation

Now available for unmoderated tasks, AI Moderation preserves qualitative depth even without a human researcher present. Acting as an in-the-moment assistant that strictly follows the researcher's defined intent, it asks clarifying follow-up questions (in text), prompts participants to elaborate, and ensures tasks are fully answered while they're still engaged.

Enabled by default for all Freelance, Team, iHub, and Enterprise subscriptions. Team owners can toggle it off in team settings.

Apr 2, 2026

The full Lookback MCP

You can now connect AI tools to Lookback through our MCP server, which covers nearly everything you can do in the UI — creating and managing projects, rounds (including recruit rounds), recordings, and participants. To use it, MCP needs to be enabled in your team settings, and you'll need a Collaborator role or above.

Feb 5, 2026

Dovetail integration

Connect your team to Dovetail and every video you record will be automatically transcoded and uploaded there. Only the video file is sent — transcripts, notes, and insights stay put. Owners can set this up in team settings.

Feb 3, 2026

Discover

We're excited to launch Discover, a new AI assistant that lets you explore everything collected in a Lookback project simply by having a conversation. Designed to help you navigate large volumes of qualitative data, Discover acts as an exploratory partner that helps you surface patterns without ever losing connection to the raw video evidence.

• Project-Wide Exploration: Discover is project-scoped, meaning it reasons across all your accumulated material, including session recordings, transcripts, Headlines, Findings, Themes, Stakeholder Goals, and notes.
  
  
• Natural Language Queries: You can easily test hypotheses or re-orient yourself in a project by asking plain-language questions like "What did participants struggle with most?" or "What themes are emerging so far?".
  
  
• Surface Hidden Patterns: Discover is especially valuable for realizing that a specific pattern exists across time or segments, helping you find insights you might not have recognized as important during live sessions.
  
  
• Always Grounded in Evidence: Discover does not invent new evidence, replace human judgment, or finalize conclusions. Instead, it summarizes and points directly back to the source material by providing quotes and links to specific video moments.
  

Happy researching!

Jan 27, 2026

Written response for Tasks

A new "Written response" option for Tasks is now available, alongside the latest iOS and Android app releases. It will allow participants to respond to Tasks with text input rather than speech. It currently supports up to 5,000 characters.

Jan 21, 2026

Findings linked to multiple goals

Findings can now be associated with multiple goals at once. Soon, Eureka will stop generating duplicate findings across different goals — one finding can now serve many goals.

Jan 13, 2026

Daily booking limits for Recruit

Set a maximum number of sessions that can be booked per day on a recruit round. The scheduling calendar now also shows booked and unavailable slots, so it's easier to see availability at a glance.

Dec 16, 2025

Custom names for task steps

You can now give task steps custom names when editing a round. Those names show up in the timeline when replaying sessions and get included in CSV/text exports too — leave a step unnamed and it'll fall back to something like "Task 2 of 2."

Nov 29, 2025

Reorder task steps and screener questions

Task steps and screener questions now have up/down buttons for reordering, alongside the existing drag-and-drop. Handy when you're working with a long list of steps or options where dragging gets fiddly.

Nov 26, 2025

Discover early access

Early access for Discover is now live! Meet Eureka, Lookback's research sidekick, which captures context, quotes, and candid feedback to help you research better and faster.

Nov 22, 2025

Collaborator note privacy

A new "Collaborator note privacy" setting is available in round settings for the Observer Lobby. Turn it on for a round and only Collaborators (and above) can see session notes left by other Collaborators — Guests and Observers can still add and see each other's notes, and chat messages and highlights stay visible to everyone.

Nov 10, 2025

Auto-reject inactive recruited participants

Auto-reject for recruited participants is now live for everyone. If a participant hasn't scheduled a session (moderated) or made a recording (unmoderated) within a time window you set in the round editor, we'll automatically reject them with User Interviews.

Oct 28, 2025

Recruit waitlist

A Reruit waitlist is now available. Once a round fills up, you can add participants to a waiting list, and we'll auto-approve them in order as spots open — whether because a participant is removed on the User Interviews side, or a researcher flags or rejects an existing one in the dashboard.

Oct 24, 2025

Copy a screener from a past round

You can now copy a screener from a past round straight into your current one. A new button opens a modal listing other rounds across your team with existing screeners, lets you preview them, and then replaces the current round's screeners with your pick.

Oct 23, 2025

Anonymize project participants and sessions

A new Project Settings option lets you anonymize every participant and session in a project. Turning it on renames every participant to "Redacted Participant," swaps their email for a unique anon.lookback.com address, and strips their name from the titles of any sessions they appear in, across all projects.

Oct 22, 2025

Multi-page screeners

You can now split long screeners across multiple pages to group related questions and reduce the risk of participants gaming their answers. Once participants move to the next page, they can't go back and edit earlier responses.

Sep 30, 2025

City selection in Recruit

You can now target specific cities when setting up recruit rounds through our User Interviews integration, giving you the choice to further refine your pool of potential participants.

Sep 24, 2025

CSV and plain-text transcript downloads

You can now download CSV and plain-text transcripts for any individual session directly from the dashboard. It works just like our existing feed exports with non-transcript filters turned off, same content rules, same permissions (you'll need to be a Collaborator on a plan with recording exports enabled).

Sep 12, 2025

Meet Fin, our AI support bot

Fin, our new AI support bot, is live! Ready to help answer common questions before they need to reach a human. You can always request to be directed to our team at any point.
Happy researching!

Sep 9, 2025

Buy additional sessions and participants

Teams can now buy additional sessions and additional participants directly from Lookback — no more manual requests needed.

Just like our Lookbucks purchase flow, you pick the quantity you need, complete payment (or generate a payment link to send to someone else), and the extra sessions or participants are added to your team automatically. Available on all plans except Trial; note that sessions can't be purchased on Enterprise plans.

June 17, 2025

Calendar integration for moderated research

You can now connect an external calendar: Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, and more, to your research projects.

Once connected, any scheduled sessions will automatically appear on your calendar, and you can choose which calendar to use for your sessions (we'll default to your primary calendar). This update also brings timezone support to your user profile, so session times show up correctly no matter where you are.

June 10, 2025

Participant package included in every paid plan

Every paid Lookback plan now gets a free participant package included. This covers the Recruitment fee for a set number of participants when using Recruit (our deep integration with User Interviews). Incentives are not included. 

The size of the participant package is 1/10th of sessions included in plan. So a Team 100 plan comes with 10 free participants. 

June 2, 2025

Multiple improvements to Recruit

Researchers can now edit "study end dates" on launched Recruit Rounds, auto-approve qualified participants, and more easily review participant data, including study qualification and screener answers. 

May 26, 2025

Unlimited Unmoderated Sessions

Starting today, all Team and Insights Hub plans get unlimited Unmoderated testing. 

April 9, 2025

Always display last toggle for tasks

In addition to the "Keep with previous" toggle, we've added a "Always display last" toggle that allows you to set one task on a flow to always show last regardless of randomization. 

April 3, 2025

Task Types

You can now choose between three (3) different task types: Task, Single Choice, or Multiple Choice. Single and Multiple choice task types are great for simple rankings, choices, and for asking follow up questions after a standard task (e.g. after having them perform a task in a prototype or on your website). You can learn more in this help article. 

March 31, 2025

Participant Search

Participants are now searchable both from the Participants tab and from the global Search feature. 

March 6, 2025

Participant Recruitment - Moderated

Participant recruitment is now available on all round types - moderated and unmoderated. On moderated rounds, your participants will be sent a scheduling link to pick a time to meet with you. Please see this help article to learn more. 

February 3, 2025

Participant Recruitment

You can now recruit your participants directly in Lookback for unmoderated research (moderated coming soon) from our partners at User Interviews! No separate account or login is required; everything can be done from your Lookback dashboard. To learn more about this feature, please see this help article. 

January 15, 2025

Stakeholders

Understanding stakeholders is one of the main keys to maximizing the impact of UX research. That is why we have built three brand new, AI powered, workflows right into the Lookback product: Stakeholder Interviews, Stakeholder Goals, and Automatic Surfacing of Findings. To learn more about these features, please check out the help article here. Happy researching!

December 16, 2024

Tasks: Keep with previous task

Sometimes it can be helpful to randomise your tasks in an unmoderated study to ensure the order of your tasks doesn't influence your results. However, there may still be instances where you want to keep some of the tasks grouped in a specific order, e.g. the two tasks need to be completed in sequence or you want to ask some follow up questions from the previous tasks. The "Keep with previous" function allows you to do that and you can read more about it here. 

November 8, 2024

Themes

With Themes, you can now better organize your Findings view in each project. Currently you can only add one Theme per finding, but we will soon be adding the functionality to support multiple themes per finding. You can learn more about using Themes in this help article. 

October 8, 2024

Public Links for Findings

Findings (formerly known as Highlights) are most often collected together and shared in Reels. However, sometimes a single finding is all you want to share with your stakeholders. You can now share individual findings using Public Links. Public Links for Findings can be generated either from the dashboard directly or within the player. You can learn more about both options in this help article. 

September 10, 2024

PreCheck

Live sessions are an exciting part of research, but late participants and no-shows can quickly derail your plans and leave you feeling frustrated. That’s why we created PreCheck, a simple tool designed to boost participant readiness and ensure your research days run smoothly. You can learn more about how PreCheck (Beta) works in this help article. 

July 3, 2024

New Dashboard

To help improve the creation of Findings & Reels as well as make room for some upcoming features, we've made some significant changes to our dashboard. You can read more about those changes in this help article.

May 23, 2024

Additional Language Support

We've now added localisation support for Czech (🇨🇿) and Dutch (🇳🇱).

Just set the preferred language in your Round settings, make sure your participants are using the latest versions of our iOS and Android apps, and your participants will enjoy a translated Participant experience.

April 29, 2024

Redact Content

Sometimes a participant may share sensitive information during a session that needs to remain private. With our Redact feature, you can now "blank out" sections of a recording to ensure your participant's information is protected. Check out this help article to learn more!

March 28, 2024

Updated Extension-free Experience

After launching our extension-free beta last year, it was a step in the right direction as it eliminated the need for participants to download any extension to participate on their desktop computer. 
We're now leveraging Chromium's built-in Picture-in-Picture feature which eliminates the need for participants to rearrange windows which was one of the main painpoints with our original extension-free beta. In addition, participants are now free to use not only Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, but we've also added Brave as a supported browser.

We hope you and your participants will enjoy the updated experience and we welcome any feedback you might have. You can read more about it in this help article. Happy researching! 

February 22, 2024

Discussion Guides

Moderators can now create a Discussion Guide for moderated sessions to help make sure you cover all the important questions and topics during a live session. To learn more about how to set up and use Discussion Guides, please see this help article.

February 15, 2024

Session Feed - Side-by-side View

With the addition of our Eureka AI assistant, the Session Feed was split into 2 tabs: Feed and Transcription. There may be times when you want to view both which can be done utilising our side-by-side view.

December 15, 2023

Moderator Push Links

Sometimes you need to send a new link/URL to your participants during a live session. Moderators can now do this using our Moderator Push Links. These will auto-open in the participant's browser and work on iOS, Android, and Windows/Mac (using the extension-free beta).

For more details, please check out this help article.

Happy researching!

December 05, 2023

Eureka: Your AI Research Sidekick

Interviewing users is tough, interviewing users and taking notes at the same time... well that's really tough.

But not anymore 👀

Our team is excited to share Eureka, a new feature in Lookback that takes high-quality notes and generates instant clips all with the click of a button.

Simply set up your user interview or usability test in Lookback and invite a participant to join. Then, whenever you hear something important, hit the 'Eureka' button to automatically generate a time-stamped note.

With Eureka by Lookback, you can focus more on your participant and less on your notepad.

Click here to learn more about how Eureka can help with your research!

August 23, 2023

Randomised Tasks

Sometimes when doing a task-based research study, it's helpful to present the tasks in a random order to see if it affects the outcome. You can now choose that option in your Tasks rounds and each of your participants will receive the tasks in a random sequence.

June 9, 2023

Localised Language Support

Lookback is now available in Brazilian Portuguese (🇧🇷), Spanish (🇪🇸), French (🇫🇷), and Swedish (🇸🇪).

Just set the preferred language in your Round settings and your participants will enjoy a translated Participant experience.

May 17, 2023

Transcribe Uploaded Content

When we launched our Upload feature last year, it was not possible to transcribe that content but now you can! Uploaded recordings can now be transcribed just as sessions recorded natively in Lookback. 

April 21, 2023

Observer Lobby

February 24, 2023

Extension-Free Lookback (Beta)

February 23, 2023

Search

If you have a Lookback organization that does a lot of research, sometimes it can be difficult to find that one session or project amidst all the others.

That's why we're excited to announce that we've added search functionality to the Lookback dashboard! You'll find it on the left hand side of your dashboard and it will allow you to search across text content in your organization - transcripts, sessions, participants, notes, highlights, etc...

This is our first release in a series of upcoming changes this spring aimed at making sure you can use Lookback not only for doing and collaborating around research, but also as a longer term repository.

Oh, and in other news, we've also added Afrikaans, Danish, English (New Zealand), English (South African), Swedish, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese (Traditional) to our transcription options.

Happy reSEARCHing!

December 12, 2022

The New Lookback and Respondent Integration

Streamline your qualitative research with the new Lookback + Respondent integration

Most of us who do research day-to-day spend a lot of time, well, not doing research. 

That’s because there’s a tremendous amount of planning, preparation, and general administrative overhead in making sure research is done well. This is especially true when we’re using multiple tools to get the job done. 

Today, things just got a little easier.

We’re excited to announce a new integration between Lookback and Respondent that streamlines your research workflows in both tools.

If you’ve heard of Lookback, you already know it’s a great platform for conducting qualitative research sessions like user interviews and usability tests. If you’ve been a Lookback user, you also know it’s the best way to get your team involved in your research - making it easy to watch live research sessions, create highlight reels, and catch full research session recordings.

Our new partner, Respondent, is a powerful recruitment platform, especially for business professionals. You can’t do research without having access to the right people, and Respondent makes it easy to reach exactly who you’re looking for. 

Now that we’re working together, here are some of the new ways to supercharge your research workflow with our new integration:

1. You can now use Lookback research session links in Respondent with prospective research participants
2. Recordings will automatically show up on Lookback after a Respondent participant has finished their session
3. Respondent will automatically update the status of each participant in your study after completion of research sessions on Lookback

For more information on connecting your Lookback and Respondent accounts, check out Respondent's four step guide to integration.

Finally, if you have any questions about the new Lookback + Respondent integration, please reach out to the Lookback support team, we'd be happy to help.

Happy Researching!

November 15, 2022

Activity Feed

With our new Activity Feed feature, you can see all of your relevant notifications: when someone mentions you in session notes, replies to one of your notes in a thread, or even when a transcription is completed for a session. 

October 5, 2022

Unmoderated Session Limits

When conducting unmoderated research, you often need to invite more participants than you actually need because not everyone will be available or show up. Now, as a researcher, you can set a limit for how many sessions will be allowed for unmoderated research rounds!

When the round limit is reached, we'll show a message within our apps informing the participant. 

We hope this will open up new use cases for unmoderated research rounds where you can freely distribute participates links without the worry of using up too many sessions or having to pay out too many incentives. Simply set the limit in your round, and you're ready to go!

October 5, 2022

Threaded Notes

Lookback's time-stamped notes are one of our most popular features. We've made them even more helpful with the addition of our Threaded Notes feature. Now, you can pull in stakeholders and teammates to weigh in on crucial moments of a session, making your research more transparent and impactful.

To reply to an existing note, hover over the note, click "Reply," and type in your reply. You can also collapse the threads to reduce clutter in the session feed.

October 3, 2022

Better Landing Page Behavior in our Mobile Apps

We’re happy to announce a change to how our mobile app browsers work when a landing page exists in a SelfTest, LiveShare, or In-person Round.

Starting with Lookback Participate 2.5.0 for Android, and Lookback Participate 4.9.0 for iOS, the app browser will behave more like the mobile browsers your participants are used to. Read about what this means for your Round setup and the participant experience in our Help Center.

August 22, 2022

Playable Reels

Highlight Reels are a great way to collect insights and snippets from multiple research sessions into one, easily digestible video. Previously, the only way to view these Highlight Reels in their entirety was to download the file and share it with colleagues and stakeholders.

Now, with Playable Reels, you can playback the entire Reel right from your Lookback dashboard just like any other session and you can even share with those outside of your Lookback Organization using Public Links. 

June 30, 2022

Upload your own research

We might be biased, but we believe Lookback is not only a great platform to capture Interviews and Usability Testing with your users, but also for sharing insights with colleagues and stakeholders using time-stamped notes, highlights and highlight reels.

However, there may be times when – for whatever reason – you're not able to conduct a research session in Lookback (e.g. Focus Groups). Previously you'd just have to keep those videos in a separate location and/or download your videos from Lookback and add them to that repository.

We're excited to announce that for the first time ever you can now upload non-Lookback recorded videos into our system! This allows you to collect all your research sessions in one place as well as leverage our notes, highlight reels, and other great features.

For more information, please check out our Help Article on uploading videos to Lookback.

May 17, 2022

Editable Transcriptions ✏️

A.I. and machine learning are great, but they're not perfect. While our transcription feature (from AWS) is quite robust, sometimes it doesn't get everything quite right.

Well, now you can fix that with the introduction of editable transcriptions! Not only can you correct any mistakes but you can also link to transcription items or delete them, just as you would with notes and chats. 

May 11, 2022

User Interviews Integration 🤝

We've had a long standing and good relationship with our friends over at User Interviews, which is a recruitment service. Now, we've taken it to the next level with a joint integration!

On the Lookback side the integration works mostly behind the scenes – you'll only see it as a small message in the modal where you find the participant link. On the User Interviews side recordings of sessions scheduled with their interface will also be accessible at their end. This removes the burden of the manual cross-referencing previously needed when using our two products separately.

You can read more about the integration on User Interview's site here or in our help article.

April 28, 2022

Preview Links & Preview Sessions

One of the most requested features from our trial and self-serve customers (Freelance, Team, & Insights Hub) has been the possibility to preview a session without using up any “real” sessions. Now, with Preview Links, you can try the participant experience without that session being counted. It's the same flow and has the same device and network requirements as a standard session. Preview Links can be accessed in the Round Editor, and they are used in the same way as a regular participant link, but the recording of a Preview Session will have some special limitations:

• Limited to 1 minute of playback
• Transcriptions of sessions are not available
• Highlight creation is not possible

If later you want to convert a Preview Session to a regular session, that option is available. Once done, you’ll be able to watch the entire video in which case it would be counted against your session quota.

For full details, please see the Preview Links help article.

March 31, 2022

Easier to Find Team Members

If you have a lot of team members in your Lookback organization, it can sometimes be difficult to find them easily. We’ve made some changes to the UI to help with this:

1. The default view, Everyone, has been switched to alphabetical sorting by first name.
2. There’s now a drop-down that allows you to filter team members by role: Collaborators, Observers, or Suspended.
3. The Owner of your Lookback organization is displayed at the top of the list (but won't be visible if the owner is you).

March 31, 2022

Choose a Default Role for New Members

Lookback organizations that use SAML/SSO (Single-sign on) have the option to choose a default role when new team members are added – Collaborator or Observer. The roles can always be changed later, if needed. We’ve made this change for two reasons:

1. to ensure you don’t unintentionally use up all of your Collaborator licenses
2. to ensure you don’t unintentionally restrict users’ access.

 The owner can change the default setting at any time in the SSO settings.

March 17, 2022

Links between Highlights and Original Sessions

Highlights are a great way to select snippets from your sessions and share with stakeholders. However, once added to the dashboard and/or used in Highlight reels, it can be difficult to remember which session the highlight was created from, especially in projects with a lot of sessions. Highlights now contain a link back to their original session, making it easier to determine where they came from. 

January 28, 2022

60 Day Trials 🎉

To give our trialers sufficient time to fully explore Lookback and all its possibilities, we've increased the duration of our free trial from 14 days to 60 days. 

January 12, 2022

New Pricing Plans

We used to have only two options for self-serve customers: Team (100 sessions) and Insights Hub (300 sessions). To accommodate for needs that our customers have made us aware of we've added subscription plans to increase flexibility and bridge some gaps:

• Freelance (including 10, 20 or 40 sessions maximum/year)
• Team with 150 sessions/year
• Insights Hub with 500 sessions/year

You'll find all available subscription plans here and this article will help you find the plan that best fits your needs.