Audience

Closed the tab mid-briefing? Audience Research does not make you pay twice.

A briefing is built in four steps, and the work is saved after each one. Here is what the Unfinished and Stopped labels on your saved list mean, what Retry this step actually re-runs, and why you should reopen the old briefing instead of starting a new one.

October 22, 20265 min read

You press Generate the briefing, the progress list starts ticking, and then your laptop closes, your train goes into a tunnel, or you remember a call and shut the tab. The natural next move is to open a new briefing and type everything in again.

Don't. The old one is still there, and it is waiting for you.

A briefing is four requests, not one

The progress screen shows four lines. The first three are research passes: reading up on how the industry is built, looking at who works there and who they compete with, and digging into what people complain about and worry about. The fourth is writing your briefing.

Each line is its own request, and each one saves what it found before it hands off to the next. The page you are looking at is what moves the job forward. That is why the screen says you can leave and that your progress is saved, and why leaving stops the job rather than ruining it.

Read the badges on your saved list

Open the saved briefings page and every briefing is listed newest first, with a date. Finished ones carry no badge. The others do:

Not started means the briefing was created but no step has run.
Unfinished means it stopped partway through research or while writing.
Stopped means a step failed and the briefing is parked on it.

Those are three different situations, and none of them means the work is gone. The list keeps unfinished briefings on purpose, so you can find one and let it finish instead of paying for a second.

Reopen it and let it run

Click the title. If the briefing has a step left, the page opens with a card called Picking up where it stopped. It tells you the briefing did not finish last time, that nothing is charged twice, and that it resumes from the stage it reached. The progress list starts again at that step, not at the top.

Leave the tab open this time. A couple of minutes is the normal length of the whole job, and you have already done some of it.

Retry this step means one step

If a step fails outright, you get a message and a button called Retry this step. The text next to it is blunt: the steps that already finished are saved, and retrying picks up from the one that failed. It does not start over.

So if the third research pass failed, you keep the first two. Press the button before you decide the tool is broken. A dropped connection and a slow step look the same from your chair, and a second attempt at one step is cheap.

When the report says it did not research

There is one more outcome worth knowing. If the research steps find nothing usable, the report is still written, from your own speaker profile, and it is marked as built from your profile only. The tool does not present an unresearched report as a researched one.

That label is your cue to be careful. A profile-only briefing can still be useful for structuring your talk, but treat its claims about the room as guesses. The difference between sourced facts, inferences, and open questions is covered in what the three kinds of claims in a briefing mean.

What to do instead of starting over

Open the saved briefings page before you create anything new.
Look for a row with an Unfinished, Stopped, or Not started badge and a title that matches your event.
Open it and let the Picking up where it stopped card finish.
If a step fails, use Retry this step before anything else.
Delete the leftovers you do not need. Each row has a delete control, and it asks you to confirm first.

The event details you typed are saved with the briefing, so the one thing you are protecting is the work of typing them again. If you have not seen how that form works, the event brief walkthrough covers the fields that matter most, and the speaker profile post explains why filling it in before you generate changes what you get back.

Questions

Do I have to keep the page open while a briefing builds?

No. The progress screen tells you that you can leave and that your progress is saved. The page is what carries the job from one step to the next, so leaving pauses it. Opening the briefing again from your saved list picks it back up.

Will an unfinished briefing be charged again if I reopen it?

The screen you land on says nothing is charged twice and that the briefing resumes from the stage it reached. Starting a fresh briefing for the same room is the thing that creates a second one.

What does Retry this step re-run?

Only the step that failed. The steps that already finished are saved, and the retry screen says it does not start the briefing over.

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