Bring in interviews you ran elsewhere

Research you already ran does not have to stay outside Strella. Upload a recording or a transcript and it becomes a session in your project, with the same AI summary and the same searchable transcript as an interview Strella moderated itself. Notes are read the same way, so they can appear in themes, transcript search, and AI chat too. The difference is that a note isn't anyone's interview, so it never counts as a participant.

When this matters

You have a round of interviews from before you started using Strella, or from a study you moderated in another tool, and you want them in the same place as your Strella interviews. Themes drawn from thirty interviews are more useful than themes drawn from the eighteen that happened to run here.

What you can upload

Transcripts and notes go through the same upload. Strella reads each file and classifies it as a transcript or as notes, so you do not label them yourself. Strella almost always reads subtitle files (VTT and SRT) as transcripts.

Upload a file

1. Open Results, then Interviews

   Go to your project's Results tab and stay on Interviews.

2. Open the Import menu

   Click the ⋮ menu at the top of the interviews list and open Import.

3. Choose what you're uploading

   Upload video for a recording. Upload transcript or notes for text. (Import from projects in the same menu is a different thing: it moves sessions between your own Strella projects.)

4. Add your files

   Drop in one file, or up to 10 text files at once. Strella uploads each file on its own, so one that fails does not discard the rest, and you can retry just that file.

The dialog closes once every file has uploaded. If some failed, the dialog stays open, lists those files, and shows a message with how many of your files uploaded.

What happens to an uploaded interview

A video or a transcript becomes a session in your project. Strella transcribes a video, then treats both the same way:

• It gets an AI summary and Highlights, the same as an interview run here.
• Strella includes it in the themes built across your research objectives.
• It is searchable in AI chat and through the Strella MCP connector.
• It counts as a participant, so it adds to your project total, your Completed count, and your participant limit.

What an upload does not get

• No per-question breakdown. The Questions view uses what a moderator captured live while working through the question guide, so uploads do not appear there. This is true for uploaded recordings and uploaded transcripts alike. You get the summary, the highlights, and the searchable transcript instead.
• No highlight reel or click-to-seek, for a transcript. A transcript has no video, so there is nothing to cut into a shareable reel and nothing to seek. Highlights still appear. Clicking one scrolls the transcript instead of jumping to a moment in a recording.
• Timing is only as good as the source. A VTT subtitle file carries real timings. Other formats carry timings only when the file itself shows them (a [0:03] at the start of a line, for example). Without them, Strella spaces turns evenly and the timestamps are not meaningful.

A note is analyzed too, but counts as nobody's interview

When an uploaded file is your own notes rather than a record of a conversation, Strella saves it as a note. Notes appear in their own Notes section below the interviews grid, not as session cards.

A note is read the same way an interview is: it can appear in themes, transcript search, and AI chat. What it never does is count as a participant, since a note isn't a conversation Strella can attribute to anyone. It also skips the Summary and Highlights tabs an interview gets, since those describe a person's session. Strella gives each note a short title drawn from its content, so you can tell notes apart at a glance. Open a note to read it in full, rename it from its title, or delete it.

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