How Dovetail improved WER by 36% with AssemblyAI to power continuous customer intelligence

As a leading customer intelligence platform, Dovetail empowers thousands of teams—from Amazon to Canva—to capture and act on customer feedback faster and more effectively than ever before.

In a digital environment overwhelmed by raw, messy, and often disjointed customer data, Dovetail's AI-powered platform brings clarity. It ingests mountains of feedback from interviews, support calls, product reviews, and more—transforming it into clear, shareable insights that drive decision-making across organizations.

Doug Rathbone, VP of Engineering at Dovetail, explains: “Imagine going into a single tool and simply asking, ‘What should my team work on next?’—and knowing the answer will actually drive growth or customer success.” That’s what the Dovetail platform aims to do.

With the recent launch of Dovetail's latest AI innovations, the company takes this vision even further. Now, every piece of customer intelligence lives in one place, with AI-powered features like automated summarization, contextual chat, and soon—real-time coaching agents. It’s a new standard for speed and intelligence in product and customer teams.

Why speech transcription accuracy matters

The foundation of Dovetail’s intelligence? Speech-to-text transcription accuracy.

Customer conversations are inherently messy and unstructured, full of overlapping dialogue, informal phrasing, and unique accents. To deliver reliable, high-quality insights, Dovetail needs its transcriptions to be precise, diarized, and context-aware.

“The accuracy of transcription is critical to the value we deliver to our customers. Humans communicate in a very messy fashion,” explains Rathbone. 

That’s why the team ran an in-depth experiment comparing transcription providers—and AssemblyAI came out on top.

AssemblyAI offers both asynchronous and real-time (streaming) speech transcription, as well as speech understanding models, at industry-leading accuracy built on cutting-edge AI research and accessible through a simple API. 

For Dovetail, this partnership meant significant results: 

• 36% improvement in word error rate (WER)
• ~10% improvement in speaker diarization (speaker labels)
• Notable increase in customer sentiment tied to transcript quality

These results “made it really simple for us to use AssemblyAI as our preferred transcription provider,” continues Rathbone. 

Driving innovation without friction

Like many AI-forward companies, Dovetail experiments constantly with evolving models and technologies. But experimentation can stall when procurement and billing become roadblocks. 

That’s where AssemblyAI’s AWS Marketplace integration provided a key advantage: “It made it easier to just think about AssemblyAI as part of our rolled-up cloud costs, which helps us stay nimble,” explains Rathbone.

And as AI reshapes the business landscape, Dovetail is building not just for today’s needs—but for tomorrow’s possibilities.

From auto-summarized support calls to generative agents guiding product decisions in real time, the possibilities are expanding fast. And with partners like AssemblyAI providing the transcription backbone, Dovetail’s teams are free to dream, build, and ship features once thought impossible.