NVivo AI Cloud: AURA Chat (Your Conversational Research Assistant)

AURA Chat is the conversational AI assistant inside each project. You can use it to ask questions about your coded corpus in plain language, and AURA answers with grounded, cited evidence drawn from your sources, codes, cases, and memos.

AURA can also propose changes to the project (a new memo, codes added to your codebook, a code applied across excerpts), but it never writes on its own. Every change it wants to make is shown to you as a prompt, and you approve, edit, or reject it.

A thread is automatically created and titled when the first message is posted; all subsequent messages in the same conversation belong to that thread.

Steps to use AURA Chat

1. Click AURA from the top right corner of NVivo AI Cloud.
   
2. Type your question in the message box and click the send icon. Your prompt is saved to the chat, so your own words stay in the conversation even if an answer is interrupted.
3. If AURA proposes something that would change your project (saving a memo, creating codes, or coding excerpts), it displays a proposal card for you to act on. Review the proposal, then choose Reject, Edit (where the prompt allows it), or Approve.
4. On Approve, AURA carries out the change and confirms what was updated (for example, how many excerpts were coded). The updates are displayed in the relevant part of your project.
5. (Optional) You can continue with a follow-up question or select one of the suggested quick-reply prompts that appear after a turn to keep the conversation going.

What AURA Chat Reads

It reads your project: framing and methodology, sources, codebook, cases, memos, concepts, and excerpts. It searches the corpus semantically or for exact wording, and computes counts, coverage, and frequency as charts.

How AURA Chat Proposes Changes

It acts only with your approval. Every change arrives as a proposal stating exactly what it will do. AURA can propose to:

• save or update a memo,
• suggest a code,
• apply a code to an excerpt,
• create excerpts for every occurrence of a phrase,
• merge two codes (showing how many excerpts move),
• create and update concepts, and
• create or update cases, attributes, and variables.

Tracing Your Claims

Every claim is traceable. Citations are numbered buttons that open the passage they cite in its source document. Verbatim quotes are italicized, and names are bolded.

Managing Conversations

Conversations persist across sessions; you can always reopen where you left off. You can also rename a conversation. All these actions are recorded in the audit trail.

Saving Answers to Memos

Send an answer to a memo, including chart-only answers, with formatting, tables, charts, and citations preserved.
 

Using Analytical Behaviors 

Two prompt behaviors are available:

• Devil's Advocate searches for disconfirming evidence against a claim.
• Outlier Detection (Find Outliers) surfaces deviant cases that don't fit the pattern.

Both are also available as one-click starting prompts in a new chat; see Built-in AURA Chat Prompts.