What is a Signal Session?
A live AI-facilitated voice conversation — and how it's different from the Signal Event it runs
Two terms come up constantly when working with Savo. Understanding the distinction between them makes everything else clearer.
Signal Event — The interview template. Designed in Event Studio and stored in the Signal Event Library. Defines the interview mode, the topics, the dimensions being measured, and the conversation flow. A Signal Event is a reusable design asset.
Signal Session — A live AI-facilitated voice conversation. One participant, one conversation. Each time a Signal Event is run with a real participant, that's a Signal Session. A Signal Event can produce many Signal Sessions.
Think of it this way: a Signal Event is the script; a Signal Session is the performance.
What happens in a Signal Session
When a participant clicks their invitation link, a Signal Session begins. The AI interviewer — built on Savo's multi-agent runtime — greets the participant by voice and begins the conversation.
The session follows the structure defined by the Signal Event, but it isn't rigid. The AI listens to what the participant says, asks follow-up questions to explore what they mean, and moves through topics at the participant's pace. Each session is unique because each participant is different.
From the participant's perspective, it's a conversation. They speak; the AI listens and responds. There's no form to fill in, no options to select, no right or wrong answers.
What a Signal Session produces
When a session ends, the conversation is transcribed and processed. The result is:
- A transcript — a full text record of the conversation, linked to the participant's pseudonymized code
- Evidence units — the specific passages where the participant addressed each dimension
- Dimension scores — 1–5 scored dimensions derived from the evidence, with confidence levels attached
These outputs feed into the campaign report when all sessions in a campaign are complete.
How sessions relate to campaigns
Signal Sessions happen inside campaigns. A campaign defines the Signal Event to run, the participant list to invite, the schedule, and the budget. When a campaign is active, Savo sends invitations and each participant who completes their session contributes one Signal Session to the campaign's data.
See What is Savo? for the full picture of how Signal Events, Signal Sessions, dimensions, and campaigns fit together.