Share interview clips, leave comments, and drop live reactions with Observer Rooms

May was a full month! We added Observer Room clips, reactions, and new lobby music. We launched Rally MCP at Research Week and opened it up to all customers. And we shipped a handful of updates that quietly make the day-to-day a lot smoother: automatic co-signer consent, AI-powered screener mapping, AI-assisted availability blocks, and a full accessibility pass on participant-facing forms. Here's everything that's new.

Watch the 2 minute overview: 

Share interview clips in Observer Rooms

We've rebuilt the Observer Rooms and interview recording experience in Rally and today it's live in your workspace. Here's what's new:

👀 Live experience

• Drop emoji reactions while you're watching!
• Leave comments during the session and chat with observers
• See who else is viewing the session
• Jam out to new lobby music while you wait for a session to start (recorded and produced by Blake, the lead engineer on this project!)

✂️ Clips

• Create clips directly from the transcript
• Share clips with team members in Slack
• AI-generated clip titles make naming one less thing to think about

🎥 Recording & playback

• Redesigned recording viewer with a synchronized transcript, comments, and reactions timeline
• Auto-scrolling transcripts + transcript search so you can jump to the exact moment you're looking for
• Adjustable playback speed and 10-second skip forward/back

🔔 Notifications

• Send automatic Slack notifications before interviews start

⚙️ Setup

• Give Observer Rooms a custom name for observers
• Observer Rooms now default to ON for new studies
• Or opt out of the default in Workspace Settings if your team prefers

Note: commenting and reactions are available to logged in Rally users. Guests joining via a shared Observer Room link will have a view-only experience.

And as a bonus: every interview you run in Rally is now automatically recorded and transcribed, and those recordings are available in Rally's MCP. That means you can chat with your transcripts, surface insights, and query across sessions from your fave AI tool. 🔥

Capture minor + guardian consent

If your research involves minors or participants who need a guardian to sign alongside them, Rally now handles the entire co-signature flow automatically. The participant signs as usual, Rally emails the co-signer a secure link, and once both signatures are collected, the consent record is marked complete – no manual follow-up required.

Automatically map screener responses to properties in Rally 

This feature uses AI to determine the best fit properties in your database, and automatically maps them to screener responses. 

Set your availability in seconds 

Describe when you're available when setting up an Interviews study, and Rally will auto-generate the appropriate availability block.

Accessibility improvements for the participant experience

We completed a full WCAG 2.2 audit and remediation pass across Rally's participant-facing screener and scheduling flows this month. Updates include proper heading structure, color contrast fixes across form elements, clearer error messages for screen reader users, and correct page titling. Participants using assistive technology can now navigate screener and scheduling flows more easily. 

Read our Accessibility Policy here. 

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ICYMI: We officially launched our MCP at Research Week! 

Connect Claude (or any MCP-compatible AI tool) and start asking it questions about your participants, studies, panels, and screener responses. 

The first version of the Rally MCP includes:

• Audience search. Use natural language to narrow down the right people in your panel by behavior, properties, study history, or whatever signals matter to you.
• Past research search. Pull transcripts, surface screener responses, and find what your team has already learned without opening Rally.
• Study building. Kick off new studies from the chat surface you already use. Draft a study from a prompt, refine the screener, and configure the scheduler before anything goes live. Reach out to us to get early access to study building via Rally MCP.
• Study management. Track consent submissions, incentive statuses, and the other tasks that come up when you're managing an active recruit.
• Permissions that mirror Rally. Whatever you can access in the Rally UI is exactly what the MCP exposes. No need to worry about PII leaking or unauthorized access to a panel.

We've been building our MCP alongside AI-native product orgs like Ramp, Figma, and Perplexity, and have found so much value using it to run research at Rally. We can't wait for you to try it as well.

See what Oren and Alec (Rally co-founders) have to say in this blog post.

Read the full release here.