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A modality is the kind of thing a study puts in front of simulated people. It is the most important choice you make when you create a study, because it decides what the audience actually does: read, watch, listen, look, click through, or talk. ish supports seven. The modality is fixed when the study is created. It sets the simulation mechanics, the player the audience experiences the content in, and the shape of the findings you get back.

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The seven modalities

interactive

A live product behind a URL: a website, a web app, a prototype. The audience navigates it, clicks, scrolls, and reports where the flow held up and where it broke.

text

Written content: an article, a landing page, an email, a blog post, documentation. The audience reads it as prose and reacts as a reader.

image

A still: a product shot, an ad creative, a screen design, an infographic. The audience looks and reports what they notice first and what reads as intended.

video

Moving footage with a time axis: a tutorial, an ad, a social clip, a documentary. The audience watches and reacts moment by moment.

audio

Sound with a time axis: a track, a podcast, a voiceover, an ad. The audience listens and reacts moment by moment.

document

A structured file: a deck, a report, a brochure, a guide. The audience moves through it page by page.

chat

A conversation: a simulated person talks to a chatbot endpoint, or two simulated people talk to each other. The audience converses and reports how the exchange went.
The interactive modality is labeled Product in the app. They are the same thing: a live URL the audience navigates.

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Content types tune the modality

Five modalities carry a content_type: a sub-type that tells the audience what kind of thing they are experiencing before they experience it. A text study set to editorial is read as an opinion piece; set to reference, it is read as documentation looked up rather than read end to end. The modality decides the mechanics; the content type tunes how the audience interprets what they see. Content types are optional refinements, not separate modalities. The interactive and chat modalities do not use them.
ModalityContent types
textnarrative, informational, commercial, editorial, reference, email, news
audiomusic, narration, conversation, speech, soundscape, news, ad
videotutorial, documentary, entertainment, review, lifestyle, ad, news, social_post
imageproduct, photography, infographic, artwork, interface, visual_assets, ad, social_post
documentdeck, presentation, report, brochure, guide
interactivenone
chatnone
Three content types are cross-modal, because the same intent shows up in more than one form:
  • news applies to text, video, and audio.
  • social_post applies to image and video.
  • ad applies to audio, video, and image.
This table is a summary. The live, authoritative list per modality comes from the backend. From an agent, read the ish://reference/content-types/{modality} resource, which returns the legal content_type values for that modality (and an empty list for interactive and chat). From the CLI, ish study create prints the valid types by modality in its help text.

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chat works differently

The other six modalities present a fixed artifact and watch the audience react to it. chat is a back-and-forth, so instead of a content type it carries a chat mode, chosen when the study is created:
  • external_chatbot: one simulated person probes a chatbot you point ish at (a customer-support bot, an assistant). The audience drives the conversation and reports how it went.
  • participant_pair: two simulated people talk to each other, each playing an assigned role, so you can watch an exchange play out between two sides of an audience.
A third mode, live_user (a live human talking to a simulated person), is reserved and not yet available.

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How content attaches per modality

The modality also decides what you hand ish when you add an iteration. The shape differs:
ModalityWhat you provide
interactiveA URL to the live product.
textThe copy, inline (or read from a local file).
imageOne or more images (hosted URLs or local files).
video / audio / documentA hosted file URL (or a local path that ish uploads first).
chatA chatbot endpoint, or the role setup for a paired conversation.
For video, audio, and image, you can attach copy alongside the media (a caption or surrounding text), which is how ad and social_post studies present a creative the way it would actually appear in a feed. The exact fields, defaults, and validation live in the reference, not here:

study create (CLI)

Modality and content-type flags for ish study create.

study tools (MCP)

study_create and study_add_iteration parameters per modality.

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Why the modality matters

The modality is not a label on the study; it is the simulation. It picks the player the audience experiences the content in, the role they take (reader, viewer, listener, visitor, or one side of a conversation), and what kind of journey ish can report on. A video study can report on a reaction at a timestamp; a document study reports page by page; an interactive study reports where a click flow stalled. Choose the modality that matches the real form the thing will ship in, and the audience reacts to it the way the people you are building for will. That audience is simulated. Your audience, ish. The journey it reports back, the timestamps, the friction, the moments that landed, are the literal record of the run.

Study

How a study, its iterations, and its modality fit together.

People

Who the audience is and how ish grounds them.