Google Slides: Slides Q&A Lets You Re-Engage With Your Audience

Slideshow presentations are almost universally groan-inducing. While, theoretically, slides should assist a speaker, providing quick visual reinforcement of the points in a lecture, too often slideshows devolve into wall after wall of data that you either don’t interact with or maybe scribble down a query about, only to forget your questions by the end of the lecture. Or even worse, the presenter simply reads from the slides, and you watch as waves of individuals start nodding their heads as they struggle to stay awake. Something I refer to as “slideshow-induced narcolepsy.” While speakers’ presentation styles are mostly immutable; Google Slides has unveiled Slides Q&A, a presentation feature that will allow audiences to engage and interact, not just with the presenter, but with the rest of the audience.

Google Slides is the company’s Microsoft PowerPoint analogue. While Slides already has an impressive array of templates and effects to jazz up presentations, at the end of the day, a slideshow is a slideshow. But what if you could provide your audience with a link that let them comment or ask questions on slides in real time? And even better, what if everyone else that went to that link could see what had already been asked and vote on questions. Can you imagine if there were no more repeat questions in the Q&A? Or if the speaker answered the questions everyone cared about first, spending more time on the things the audience wanted to hear? That’s the power of Google Slides: Slides Q&A. Shree Bose , winner of the Google Science Fair recently had a chance to try out the just-announced feature in New York while presenting to the toughest audience of all: middle school students.

As you can see, audience members aren’t limited to holding their questions until the end of the presentation. And they can view the question list and vote on all the audience’s questions in real time, generating a sorted list of queries for the presenter. Not only does it improve audience engagement; it ensures that everyone, even those who feel uncomfortable asking questions in an audience, have a voice. There’s even an option to ask a question anonymously.

Google Slides is available universally on PC, Android, iOS, and the web. If you or your audience are remote, you now have the option of casting your presentation to a Google Hangouts session (one of my favorite conference collaboration tools) via Chromecast or Airplay from your iPad or iPhone. Bonus, if you’re presenting from a desktop, you now have access to a built-in laser pointer.

The Slides Q&A feature continues Google’s current trend of leveraging its interconnected products to truly innovate, rather than just copy features of more established products. Slides Q&A can make your next presentation a genuinely collaborative experience, rather than “just another lecture.” Make slideshow-induced narcolepsy a thing of the past!