Is there a way to take a form field and populate an embedded data field with it?

Can you explain why you want to do that?

Sure.
We want to use an anonymous survey link in a feature developed in our product that can pop a message up similar to intercept, but it is in our product. Our product doesn't have any merge fields to use as parameters and we don't want to invest in development work to try and pass values to the URL plus there are always concerns with security and privacy passing over the URL.
We want to ask for basic contact info for follow-up and reporting since we deliver this survey via email as well. I am looking to populate these contact fields as if they were in our embedded data, I think mainly for the dashboard, but I suppose I could map a response to the form field to the contact fields.
I may be overthinking this. I'm not sure if I explained my goal well enough, but maybe there is a different way then what I have envisioned.
We could upload our contacts and authenticate them. The contact data changes daily so maintaining the list seems like a large effort.
I was thinking that there might be a way using a web service or task to create a contact with the response in XM or populate embedded data fields that exist already from the emailed survey.
Thanks,
-Mike

MikeB ,
RecipientFirstName only has special meaning if you are using a contact list (email distribution, individual link or authenticator). If you are using a contact list the field will automatically be populated with first name.
I don't think you need to save the contact info to embedded data fields because you already have them in the question and they would just be duplicates. You can pipe and report the answer to a question just as easily as an embedded data field. Anyway, if you did want to duplicate them , pipe the question answers into the embedded fields in the survey flow, such as:

firstName = ${q://QIDx/etc...}