A complete environment for qualitative human subjects research. Transcription, thematic analysis, literature management, and dissertation writing, all in one place you control.
Sotto Solo, for doctoral candidates and independent researchers.
Sotto is local-first. It was built around one constraint: your research data stays in an environment you control, and you decide what, if anything, ever leaves it.
When you upload interview transcripts, survey data, or field notes to a general-purpose AI, that data passes through servers you do not control. Researchers find this out at the wrong moment, usually after data has already moved.
Your research data stays on your own machine, or in a private instance you run on AWS or Azure, in an environment only you can access. Participant data is analyzed on-device.
Analysis runs on a local model, so no other researcher's data shares your environment and nothing passes through shared infrastructure. Nothing reaches an outside AI model unless you send it there.
Most research tools do one thing well. Sotto covers the full arc of qualitative work, from your research question to written findings, and works within your methodology rather than around it.
Before you collect anything, Sotto helps you shape your research question, build your instruments, and prepare your IRB application, all in the environment where your data will live. Audio-to-text runs locally, so your interview recordings are transcribed with speaker turns, formatted, and ready for coding. From your coding, Sotto suggests recurring themes to review, shows how a code spreads across participants, and prompts you with questions to scaffold a reflective memo after a session. Grounded theory, thematic analysis, phenomenological methods, Sotto works within your approach.
EdD and PhD researchers conducting original qualitative work.
Sotto SoloResearchers running their own qualitative studies who need a private, self-contained environment.
Sotto SoloSotto Solo launches focused on the qualitative workflow, in English, on Windows. Here is what is coming next.
We are running live demos this week. Sign up and we will send you a time. Sotto Solo will be $30/mo or $350/yr at launch.