Survey tools give you a spreadsheet. Two hundred rows of free text later, somebody has to read all of it and write a summary, and by the time they finish, another thirty responses have landed.
Docutrain forms take a different route. A form is a standalone, shareable page you build in the dashboard, and its responses accumulate into a chat document you can question directly. "What are the most common complaints this month?" "What do people say they are struggling with?" The answers come from the submissions, with the same grounding rules as any other Docutrain assistant.
Unlike helpers, which sit on an existing document's chat, a form is its own thing with its own link.
Building one
The builder puts editing controls on the left and a live preview on the right, which reports "n of m fields visible" as your conditional rules take effect. That count is a small thing that saves a lot of confusion once logic gets involved.
Field types cover the usual ground: short and long text, email, number and date; dropdown, radio, checkboxes and yes/no; a five-star rating and a numbered scale with your own end labels. Plus sections, which are headings rather than questions, and which each start a new step.
Two structural details are worth knowing before you start typing.
The slug is fixed after the first save. It fills in from your title and can be edited until you save, then it is locked, because shared links have to keep working. Get it right early.
Deleting a field also clears any conditions pointing at it. No orphaned rules quietly referencing a question that no longer exists.
Conditional display works from choice fields that appear earlier in the form: show this only when that field is, is not, or is one of certain values. Questions hidden this way are skipped entirely and recorded as not shown rather than as blank, so your data distinguishes "did not apply" from "declined to answer". A step whose questions are all hidden is skipped too.
The setting to think about before you publish
In form settings, Include respondent identity in chat knowledge is the one that deserves a moment.
Leave it off, which is the right default for anything sensitive, and the companion chat document refers to people as "Respondent #1" and "Respondent #2". Names and email addresses stay in the responses table where you can see them, and never enter the material the assistant reads. You can ask what people said without the assistant being able to tell you who said it.
Turn it on and identities go into the knowledge, which is what you want for something like a directory or a project intake, and wrong for almost anything where people expected candor. Changing it re-processes every response, so the decision is reversible, but make it deliberately.
Let respondents resume later saves in-progress answers in the respondent's own browser. Useful for a long form, and worth leaving off for a sensitive one that might be filled in on a shared machine.
Collect respondent name/email adds a required details step at the start.
Publishing creates a document
A form is a draft, open, or closed. Publishing makes it live at its public link and creates the companion chat document at the same moment. It needs at least one real question first, since sections alone are not a form.
Because publishing creates a document, it counts against your plan's document allowance and will be refused at the limit like any other. See plans and limits.
You can keep editing a published form. If it already has responses, a notice reminds you that those keep their original wording while edits apply to new ones, which is the honest behavior: rewriting a question does not retroactively change what people were asked.
Close stops accepting responses with a clear message to visitors rather than a broken page. Reopen resumes.
What respondents get
The public page carries your branding, logo and accent color included. Longer forms split into steps with a progress sidebar on larger screens. Each step validates as they continue, highlighting unanswered required questions and malformed email addresses.
On the last step the button reads Submit, with a small note that answers stay private. Someone returning with saved progress gets a banner saying so, and a Start over option.
One deliberate absence: there is no captcha. Submissions are rate limited instead. Nobody proves their humanity by identifying traffic lights before they can tell you about their experience.
Reviewing what came in
The responses view lists submissions with their number, time, identity where collected, and a status chip.
That chip is the useful part. Synced means the response is in the companion document. Pending means incorporation is still running. Failed means it did not make it, with a retry control and the reason on hover. You can always tell whether what you are chatting with includes everything you have received.
Export to CSV gives you the raw data, with multi-select answers joined by semicolons, and questions a respondent never saw left blank rather than filled with a false empty.
The companion document
You never upload this one. It appears when you publish, takes the form's title, and opens with "Ask questions about the responses to your form title."
It arrives owner-restricted and unlisted in public galleries, so only people with access to your organization can chat with it until you decide otherwise. A form gathering candid feedback does not become a public assistant by accident.
It keeps itself current. Each submission is added shortly after it arrives, and the overall summary is rebuilt a few minutes after the last one in a burst, so a flood of responses does not trigger a hundred rebuilds. In your library it carries a small Form badge.
Retraining is blocked and the tab is hidden, which is correct rather than a limitation: there is no source file to replace, and regenerated content would overwrite what your respondents actually wrote. See retraining and history.
The form and its document are a pair. Deleting either deletes both, along with every response. The confirmation lists exactly what goes and makes you type DELETE, which is the right amount of friction for an action that erases other people's submissions.
The other kind of form
Separately, any document can offer a Contact tool that emails a reader's message straight to you, with their address as the reply-to and the document's title in the subject line.
It has one behavior worth knowing: every recipient address must confirm it is willing to receive that mail, and until the main one does, the Contact tool does not appear on the chat page at all. Readers never fill in a form that was never going to deliver. Unverified CC addresses block nothing and are simply left off until they confirm.