In this video, I introduce Maxqda’s ‘AI Assist’ module, which is one of the major developments that came with version 24 of Maxqda.
I did an earlier video presenting AI Assist some time after its release, and this one is an update with the AI Assist features available in early 2025.
What is AI Assist?
AI Assist is the integration of AI into Maxqda and your analyses. It’s a tool that can simplify your work by helping you with different tasks:
- automatic transcription
- summarising, a lot of things, like documents, extracts from your documents, coded segments, all coded segments from a code
- paraphrasing, which is a kind of summarising in MaxQda,
- coding, which is new, and still in Beta form at this time,
- suggesting codes and sub-codes,
- and something called “Chatting” with your documents and coded segments.
And AI Assist in Maxqda can be easily located, thanks to the AI icon (except the transcription tool, which is different). You can access AI Assist tools from:
- the main toolbar, there is now a specific tab for AI Assist,
- the document browser toolbar,
- and from a lot of context menus all over Maxqda.
There are different videos for all these tools: one for transcription, one for everything related to summarising and exploring documents, and one for everything related to coding. You can check my YouTube channel to see all videos.
In this one, I just explain how AI Assist works: it’s an add-on and there are different options, free and paid for.
Free and paid for versions
It’s a feature that’s available in two versions, one free and one paid for:
- The free one is included with the licence. There is a limited number of daily queries (it depends on the format of your text documents, etc., but it’s about summarising 10 pages of text per day).
- For the premium version, you can check the prices in your currency on their website, but overall it’s something like 10-20 euros or $US per month (depending on your licence category), and there you have an unlimited number of daily requests.
An add-on module
Something to remember is that AI Assist is an add-on module to the licence.
This means that you have to choose, when selecting your licence, whether or not you want access to this add-on.
The main reason it’s not included by default in the software is quite simple: not everyone wants to or can use artificial intelligence for their research. Because of data confidentiality policy, because to use AI Assist, the data has to leave local storage and go through a cloud service. And there are institutions that work with sensitive data and don’t allow their researchers to use it, or projects where the ethic certification does not allow this, for example.
That being said, Maxqda has high standards of security and confidentiality, it’s complying with the European GDPR standards which are I think the highest in the world in terms of security and confidentiality. And Maxqda is ensuring that all data analysed is deleted after analysis and is not used for machine learning purposes. You can find more details on their site if you want to know more.
And another reason is that, when you are lead of a project and hire people to help with the analysis, you can decide that you don’t want them to use AI, and to do the coding and analysis themselves. That’s another really valid reason not to want AI Assist installed.
So, this is why you have to decide to add it to your Maxqda when you choose your licence, and accept the terms of use.
To conclude, a word of caution…
The use of AI in research is a fairly recent development, and we need to keep a critical eye on it. Mostly, I’d like you to keep in mind that, like all tools … it is the user of the tool who is going to determine whether the results are satisfactory or not, not the tool itself. It’s up to the user to make informed, ethical and robust use of the tools. And it’s up to the user to judge the results obtained with the tool. In short, it’s like a research assistant: it’s up to you to give the right instructions and the right goals, and it’s your responsibility to evaluate the results, and see if they are robust enough to be used for your project.