Searching Across Data

Beyond the curated report, you can ask questions directly across every conversation you've recorded — things like "what are students saying about math?" or "how do kids feel about lunch this year?" Polaris pulls the relevant student moments and shows them to you with audio attached.

How to ask a question

Chat with Polaris is the box across the bottom of your dashboard. Type a question and click Ask Polaris. If you'd rather start from something concrete, the chips underneath ("What's working well for students right now?", "Where do students feel least supported?") fill the box for you to edit.

Type the question the way you'd ask it out loud. Polaris doesn't need keywords or syntax; full sentences work better than fragments. "What are students saying about our math curriculum?" returns better results than "math".

You'll get back:

• A short synthesis at the top: what students said across the matching conversations, written like a paragraph.
• Individual student quotes with attribution and audio you can play.
• Theme tags on each quote so you can tell at a glance whether it's about pace, what's working, relevance, or something else.

Every conversation you have is saved. Previous conversations, at the top right of the card, reopens anything you've asked before — so a line of questioning you started last month is still there to pick back up.

Narrowing the search

You can scope your question to a slice of your data:

• By session. Just the spring climate check-in, just the fall belonging interviews.
• By question. Just the responses to question 4 across every session.
• By theme. Just the conversations Polaris tagged with "peer relationships" or "instructional pace".

Scoping helps when you're trying to track one specific signal over time, or when you want to dig into a single question without the rest of the report's surrounding context.

How the search works

Polaris reads what you typed as a question, not as a list of keywords. Ask "what do kids think about math" and you'll get back conversations where students talked about "the math class" or "algebra" or "math homework," even if they never used the exact word "math". The system is looking for the meaning of your question, not for word matches.

When you click play on a quote, you hear the actual student in their own voice. The text and the audio are always linked.

What it can and can't reach

Chat with Polaris only reaches your own organization's conversations. It can't see another district's data, and another district can't see yours.

It also only reaches conversations that have finished processing. A session you closed this morning won't be searchable until transcription, anonymization, and tagging have run — the same pipeline that produces your report. The session's page in the Listening Portal shows how many interviews have been processed so far.

Quotes come from the anonymized transcript, so names have already been removed. If one slips through, tell us. We'll fix it upstream rather than in the single answer where you saw it.