#questfox feature alert: Client’s SFTP Server integration for audio and video files

Posted: 1. November 2020 | Author: annaliska | Filed under: Multimedia Insights | Tags: Audio, FTP, SFTP, transcription, Video |2 Comments

We are very proud of the questfox development in speech. It is possible to record someones voice and to transcribe what the person said into text.
With more than 120 languages integrated, we are perhaps the leading tool for this kind of feature in market research.
As more and more users were saving thousands of answers on our servers we constantly discussed this feature set for security and performance reasons.

Saving Audio and Video Files outside of questfox

The idea of questfox speech tools is to receive the content said as a transcribed text. On top of this procedure questfox allows to save the recorded voices. The default setting for recording audio is OFF. So you need to switch ON this feature if you want to use it and later listen to the audio files.

To record the audio files you can switch the answer settings of an audio question type to ON.

The multimedia files used to be saved independently from the answers on the questfox server in a special folder structure.
In this setting we could not prevent that project admins of a project space could listen to the audios of other projects in the same project space.
In projects with thousands of audio files we had to admit, that performance of data handling in gigabytes became an issue in the browser. With the new approach this is over. You can decide where to save your data and you will have much quicker access as you can use your established tools to work with these multimedia files.

Security by Design with SFTP

Multimedia Files are now saved on the client’s side via SFTP
We now changed this forever and fulfill an important demand of our clients who always ask: Where is the data stored? From now on the answer will always be the same: The multimedia files are saved in your own security environment and not be in connection with the rest of the survey.
The recorded answer can be saved in your own environment and therefore out of everyone’s reach, using questfox. This is a major improvement in the field of data security as the multimedia data is now stored on the client’s side.

Important Notice: Make sure, that you have a user’s allowance to record his or her voice or video before saving this very personal information somewhere on the internet. This was a requirement before this new technology was implemented and still needs to be respected.
questfox is not responsible for your behavior and not reliable for your actions with our software. So please take data protection issues serious – especially in this very delicate field.

How to integrate your SFTP Server into questfox

Under CREATE – Projects Settings you will find a place to integrate your SFTP Settings.

Your password will never show-up in questfox and cannot be copied from the data input file.

When pressing the Connection Test button you should receive the following message when all input data is correct.

questfox settings for optional audio recording on your own SFTP Server

Organize your data following your needs

The data can be organized by three different settings: Question, Calendar Week or Participant. We advise you to do this only once per project to avoid confusion in the data structure.

Default is the organisation by question. Saving a single file would create a folder called “questfox” on your SFTP Server with a subfolder carrying the project ID and more subfolders named Q1 .. Qn with your multimedia data.

If you wish to organize the folder structure differently you can switch to “Order by Calender Week” and see the result later as “44-2020” which is the 44th week of the year 2020.

If you plan to look at the answers of one person you can organize the folder structure by “Participant”. questfox would create one folder for each individual and ad the answers to one question in this folder organized by question number (here Q1 and Q2).

And by the way: We updated to the most recent versions of transcription services. So the overall quality should become always better.

We wish you all the best with this new security feature which gives you the full power to manage sensitive data on your side. The flexibility of this approach will be important for complex projects.

FLAC – Free Lossless Audio Codec

In order to be independent from any kind of manufacturer we opted for the FLAC Codec to save in perfect nearly lossless quality.

For understanding this codec better we recommend this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

In case your Audio-Tool is not able to play this data we recommend the VNC Player which can be used entirely free of charge. Download available here: https://en.vlc.de/

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