How to Migrate from Phonic to Voice Capture: A Researcher's Guide

Start here: what actually needs replacing?

Phonic ceased operations in June 2025. If you are reading this, you are past the "is it really gone" stage — you have a study to field and a hole where your voice tooling used to be.

Before you compare tools, be precise about what Phonic was doing for you, because researchers used it in two very different ways and the two need different replacements:

• Voice inside a survey you already ran elsewhere. Your questionnaire, routing, quotas and panel integration lived in Alchemer, QuestionPro, Qualtrics or similar; Phonic supplied the microphone on the open-ends. What you need back is the microphone — nothing else changed.
• Phonic as the whole study. The questionnaire itself lived there. What you need back is a survey platform and voice capture, which are two purchases, not one.

Most of the migration pain we hear about comes from people solving the second problem when they only had the first one.

Step 1 — Salvage what you can, before you can't

We cannot tell you what your Phonic account looks like today, or whether it still opens. The product is gone, and describing screens we cannot verify would be worse than useless. So the instruction is deliberately blunt: export everything you still have access to, now, and stop assuming it will be there next quarter.

Practically, that means gathering:

• The questionnaire itself — question wording, order, and above all the question IDs. This is the asset people forget, and it is the one that makes the rebuild cheap instead of expensive. If you can only save one thing, save this.
• Any response data still downloadable — transcripts, response-level exports, whatever format it comes in. Take it as-is; clean it later.
• Anything already outside the platform — the deliverable decks, the topline tables, the CSVs a colleague downloaded during fieldwork, the codeframes your coding team built. For historical waves, this is often the only surviving copy, and it is usually enough to keep a tracker comparable.

Then write down, in one paragraph, how your last wave actually worked: which questions were spoken, how long answers were allowed to run, what language fieldwork was in, and how the voice answers were joined back to the rest of the response record. That paragraph is your migration spec.

Step 2 — The real decision: rebuild, or add voice to what you already run

There are only two honest routes out of Phonic.

Route A — rebuild the study on a standalone voice-survey platform. You move the whole questionnaire into a tool that treats voice as a native question type. Everything is in one place. In exchange, you rebuild routing, quotas and panel wiring, retrain the team, and take on a new per-response or per-seat cost.

Route B — keep your survey platform and add voice to it. Your questionnaire never moves. You paste a snippet into the open-ends that used to carry Phonic, and respondents get a record button in the survey they were already taking. This is what Voice Capture does: it is an add-on to the platform you already pay for, not a platform of its own.

If Phonic sat inside an existing survey for you, Route B is not just cheaper — it is the option that preserves your instrument, which is the thing a tracker cannot afford to lose.

Comparison: rebuild vs add voice

When Voice Capture is not the answer

It is worth being explicit, because getting this wrong costs you a fielding window:

• You need a survey platform, not an add-on. Voice Capture does not host questionnaires, route respondents, manage quotas or source sample. If Phonic was the only survey tool you had, you need a survey platform first — then decide whether it comes with adequate voice or whether you bolt voice on.
• You need video, not voice. Video open-ends and testimonial capture are a different product category. See the honest roundup in 5 best Phonic alternatives in 2026.
• Your platform will not let you inject JavaScript. Some plans and some locked-down enterprise instances simply do not allow custom scripts. No embeddable widget works there, ours included.
• You need voice on closed questions or a fully voice-led interview. Voice Capture replaces typing on the open-ends. It does not turn a grid into a conversation.

Alchemer and QuestionPro are live today. Qualtrics is in development and not shippable yet — we say so on the Qualtrics integration page rather than letting you find out mid-setup.

Step 3 — Set up in Alchemer

Two steps, both in the survey editor, and neither touches your questionnaire logic.

1. Load the widget script once per survey

In Alchemer, go to Style > HTML/CSS Editor > Custom HEAD and paste the script tag from your dashboard. It looks like this:

<script src="https://api.voicecapture.ai/voice.js" defer></script>

This is done once for the whole survey, not per question.

2. Add a JavaScript Action on the question page

On the page containing the open-end, add Action > JavaScript and paste the block your dashboard generates. Two edits are yours to make: set the question ID variable to your Alchemer question number, and confirm the project key matches the project you created. The block inserts the record button next to that question's answer box and initialises it.

The generated code also picks up Alchemer's session merge code, [survey("session id")], so every recording lands joined to the right respondent — which is what makes the transcripts mergeable with the rest of your data file rather than a loose pile of audio.

Full walkthrough with the exact code: Voice Capture for Alchemer. Longer version with QA tips: how to add voice responses to your Alchemer surveys.

Step 4 — Set up in QuestionPro

QuestionPro is a single block. Go to Logic > JavaScript Logic > Pre JS and paste the code from your dashboard, replacing the placeholder with your project key. It finds the open-ended answer field on the page, inserts the widget above it, loads the script and initialises the widget — all in one paste.

One prerequisite worth checking before you promise a timeline: JavaScript Logic is only available on the QuestionPro Research and Team editions. On Essentials or Advanced the block does not exist, and no snippet-based tool can be installed. Check your edition first.

Details: Voice Capture for QuestionPro.

On any other platform that accepts custom HTML, the generic embed is a container div plus the same script tag — see the generic integration guide.

What changes for your respondents

Less than you would expect, which is the point during a migration.

• They see a record button beside an open-end they were going to answer anyway. The text box stays. Anyone who prefers to type, types — nothing is forced.
• They grant the browser's standard microphone permission. No app, no plugin, no download. It works on iOS Safari and Android Chrome, which matters because a large share of survey traffic is mobile.
• If a browser cannot record, the widget hides itself and the text open-end carries on working. A respondent never hits a dead end.
• Recording length is capped by your plan (90 seconds on the free trial, longer on paid packs). In practice a 90-second cap produces more usable, more quotable answers than an open-ended one.
• Audio is transcribed and discarded — only the text is stored, in EU infrastructure. If your consent language described Phonic storing recordings, this is a change your privacy team will want to know about, and it is a change in your favour.

What changes for you is the volume of material. Across seven client studies we measured, typed answers averaged 10 words and spoken answers to the same questions averaged 23 — about twice as much, from the same questionnaire (how we measured this). Plan a little more coding time per open-end, and expect the verbatims to sound like people rather than form-fillers.

What it costs

One credit equals one transcribed response. Credits are bought in one-time packs, not subscriptions, and they never expire:

• Free Trial — 250 credits, no card. Enough to pilot a real open-end in a real wave.
• Essential — $99 for 1,000 credits. Adds Excel export alongside CSV and removes widget branding.
• Professional — $299 for 4,000 credits. Adds API export and custom domains.
• Custom — negotiated, for continuous high-volume fieldwork.

The reason this matters coming off a shutdown: credits that never expire mean a tracker running two waves a year is not paying for the ten months in between. Current details on the pricing page.

A migration you can run this week

1. Salvage the questionnaire and any exports you can still reach.
2. Decide Route A or Route B using the table above. If your survey platform survived Phonic, it is Route B.
3. Create a free project and paste the snippet into one open-end in a test copy of the survey.
4. Record a test answer yourself on a phone, and confirm it arrives in the dashboard joined to the session — this is the check that catches a wrong project key or a missing merge code.
5. Field the wave. Export CSV or Excel and merge on the session ID.

Frequently asked questions

Can I import my old Phonic transcripts into Voice Capture?

No — Voice Capture stores what it collects, and there is no import path for another tool's archive. Keep your Phonic exports as files alongside your historical data. In practice this is the right place for them anyway: your tracker's history lives in your tabulation and analysis stack, not inside a collection widget.

Do I have to rewrite my open-ended questions?

No, but it is worth rewording them to be spoken rather than read. "In your own words, tell us what happened" gets a better spoken answer than "Please describe your experience."

How long does the switch take?

If your questionnaire already exists, budget an afternoon: account, project, one snippet per voice question, and a QA pass on a phone.

What if my platform is not supported yet?

If it accepts custom HTML and JavaScript, the generic embed works today. If it does not, no snippet-based voice tool will work — that is a platform constraint, not a vendor one.

Ready to move?

The Free Trial includes 250 credits and no credit card, which is enough to prove the approach on a live open-end before you commit budget to it.

Start Free — 250 Credits, No Card →

Also read: Phonic alternative: migrate your voice surveys to Voice Capture · 5 best Phonic alternatives in 2026