Drop in a folder of recordings or transcripts. Bristlenose transcribes, analyses, and reports back — quotes pulled out, grouped by screen and theme, sentiment marked.
A typical run takes two to five minutes. Built by a practising user researcher, open source, and free.
The Mac app bundles everything — no command line needed — and runs on macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later on Apple Silicon. Also on Homebrew and pip for the command line.
Eight study tools, in the order you meet them.
Drop a folder of recordings or transcripts — Bristlenose transcribes, analyses and reports back.
Audio, video, or transcripts exported from Zoom, Teams or Google Meet. Transcription runs on your laptop.
Let AutoCode propose tags across every quote — you Accept or Deny.
Build a codebook, or start from a ready-made framework.
Nielsen’s heuristics, Garrett’s Elements, Norman’s Design of Everyday Things, Morville’s honeycomb, Yablonski’s Laws of UX, or a Command-Line UX set.
Select one or more quotes, and press t to tag them with a code from your codebook.
Press s to keep the quotes that matter, h to hide the rest.
Chat to your data from Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or any MCP agent.
It reads your quotes, themes and codebook, and cites quote IDs you can look up. Read-only, and per project — you turn it on.
Cut from the original recording without re-encoding, with a few seconds either side.
P3 · 00:14:22 · “where to pay”.mp4P5 · 00:31:07 · “went back twice”.mp4P8 · 00:09:41 · “I gave up”.mp4Quotes land as sticky notes, grouped by section and theme, coloured by sentiment. Each sticky carries a participant code and timecode, not a name.
Export the whole report as a single HTML file — quotes, themes, analysis, your edits, all inside it. It opens in any browser straight from the file. No server, no internet, nothing to install.
Quotes to CSV or Excel, one row each — participant code, section, theme, sentiment, tags, timecode.
Click any timecode to play from that moment. The transcript scrolls in step, so you never lose your place.
Menus and controls in twenty-two languages, from Spanish and Japanese to Ukrainian and Traditional Chinese. The report content stays in the language of the interviews.
The whole Scientific-background cell — nothing on the current site says any of this.
Themes emerge from participants’ own words, not a fixed taxonomy (Braun & Clarke, 2006).
A score that combines the strength of participants’ opinions or feelings, their level of focus on an area or theme, and a measure of their agreement.
Seven sentiments, grounded in appraisal theory (Scherer) and core affect (Russell).
Quotes are cleaned of filler but the participant’s voice is honoured — the meaning is never edited.
Don Norman — the codebook frameworks draw on his principles of human-centred design.
The Tip curriculum — one line per docs page, in the order the sidebar teaches them. On the site they stop rotating and all show at once.
From a folder of recordings to a readable report in minutes.
Connect an AI provider to run the analysis. Claude is the recommended default; ChatGPT, Gemini and Azure work too.
No API key? Run Ollama locally — free, no account, nothing uploaded.
Choose what the AI sees: cloud or local. Cloud models are faster and sharper; local ones never leave your Mac.
Drop .srt, .vtt or .docx and skip transcription.
Name p1.srt next to p1.mp4 to merge them automatically.
Every analysis runs the same twelve stages. Caching means a re-run only redoes what actually changed, keeping the cost down.
Everything Bristlenose makes lands in one folder, beside your recordings — yours to keep.
Tagging is analysis — group a set of quotes under a code and the findings start to surface.
Bristlenose reads interviews as sessions and quotes. Sessions, participants, quotes, sections and themes — that’s the whole model.
Make it yours: light, dark, palette and type.
Every setting has a sensible default you can change.
The report opens in your browser when it’s done.
per hour of interview audio with Claude. Provider costs vary. Bring your own API key.
The project file lives on your machine. You pick which provider sees the transcripts. API keys live in your OS keychain.
docs/mockups/website-bento-welcome.html ·
copy lifted from WelcomeHomeView.swift and bristlenose-website/content/index.html.