Google is rolling out Slides Q&A today, a new update to its Powerpoint competitor Slides, which lets presenters directly interact with viewers and take feedback, all in real-time. With a link displayed on a Slides presentation, audience members can submit questions from their phones, laptops, and tablets—and vote on those they want answered the most.
The feature is rolling out globally today, as well as on the Android and iOS Apps.
To start with presenters who want to use the new feature will see a button in the Slides presenter view to roll out their Q&A session. As for mobile, this feature will be behind the “audience tools” button. After that, a link to the custom Q&A for this presentation will appear above the presentation.
Google — in its blog post — says that it has tested this feature with Google Science Fair winner Shree Bose, where in she presented her slides in front of 200 middle school students. All in all, the presentation generated 170 questions. The new update has a voting feature for these questions as well. In Shree’s case, she sorted the questions based on audience votes — and responded to the top ones. The question with the most overall votes was submitted by a seventh grader named Leila.
Apart from this new roll-out, Google is introducing two new features to Slides as well. These are :
- You can now present your slides to a Hangout from your iPhone or iPad. So with just your phone or tablet and the Slides app, you can present to any screen using Chromecast, AirPlay or Hangouts.
- And for those of you who like presenting from a computer, the search giant is introducing a new laser pointer on the web. Just in time for May the 4th (be with you).
