Compare
Helm Express vs Listen Labs
Listen Labs runs interviews with real people, led by an AI moderator in text, voice or video, then writes up the results. Helm Express asks simulated twins of a US place. One gives you people's own words; the other gives a quick direction for a place.
As of September 2026, from each company’s public site and documentation.
| Listen Labs | Helm Express | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | Real people from its built-in consumer or professionals panel, from your own list invited by link, or both. An AI moderator interviews them and asks follow-up questions. | In a reading, simulated twins of a place’s residents or businesses; no real person is contacted for a reading. Interviews and short studies with the public and credential-checked experts are run by arrangement, labelled as real people and kept separate. |
| Where | You target a panel by country, region or city, plus age, gender, household income and employment. Professionals can be targeted by job title, seniority, industry and company size. You can also bring your own participants from anywhere. Its panel covers 45+ countries and 100+ languages. | Any of 12,759 US places — cities, counties, metros and states — with a neighbourhood map for most of them. US only. |
| Questions you can ask | Open-ended questions with follow-ups at a depth you choose, plus multiple choice, ranking, matrix and MaxDiff. Interviews can run by text, voice or video, with screen sharing for usability tasks. Concept tests can show images, video or prototypes. Studies support screeners and conditional logic. | Yes/no, a pick among up to 12 options, or a belief question; an A/B of two messages or two pieces of news; an interview with up to five twins from a reading. |
| What comes back | Transcripts and recordings of every interview. For each question you get an AI-written summary, theme counts, comparisons between segments and highlight reels. Decks and reports can be exported. | Which way the place leans, breakdowns by group and neighbourhood, and an interval and a read-quality grade on every poll result. |
| How you start | Book a demo; existing accounts sign in. No public pricing is published. Its docs describe credit wallets for recruitment and projects, and document an API and an MCP server. | Book a call, or sign in. Planning a question and previewing its cost come before anything runs. |
| Best when | You need to hear why, in real people's own words, across many interviews run at once, including customers you already have or professional audiences. | You need a fast, low-cost direction on a local question, with its cost shown before it runs — which way the simulated place leans, and among whom — before spending on real fieldwork. |
Choose Listen Labs when
You need real people's reasons in their own words, as interview transcripts, recordings and highlight reels.
You want to interview your own customers or users, or professionals such as clinicians or decision-makers.
You are testing usability, prototypes or creative and want to watch people react, including over screen share.
Choose Helm Express when
Your question is about one specific US place, or a neighbourhood within it, and you want to see which way it leans.
You want a direction with an interval before recruiting anyone, to decide which questions are worth putting to real people.
You want to see each question's cost and plan before it runs.
What we say about Listen Labs is taken from its own public site and documentation. Check the current version at listenlabs.ai, and tell us if anything here is out of date.
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