Getting started

Here’s everything you need to go from a new account to a talk with live audience reactions.

1. Create your account

Go to speechwave.live and sign in. Enter your email and Speechwave sends you a sign-in link. There is no password to remember. Or, where offered, sign in with a Google, Microsoft, or GitHub account instead. Either way, your account is created automatically the first time you sign in.

2. Create a talk

From your dashboard, use the “Create a Talk” form and enter a title. Speechwave generates a URL slug for you automatically, and you can edit it if you’d like something more memorable. Your talk gets its own audience link: https://speechwave.live/t/<slug>.

Speechwave dashboard showing the Create a Talk form and a list of talks

Select your talk in the dashboard to see the URL for your audience and a QR code. Add the QR code and/or URL to your first slide and you’re ready to go. Your audience needs no account and no app. They open the link on their phone and they’re ready to react.

Speechwave dashboard talk panel showing the audience URL, QR code, and slug for the browser extension

4. Connect the Chrome extension

The Chrome extension is what overlays incoming reactions onto your slides while you present. Install it, then enter your API key (found in your account settings) and your talk’s slug (shown on the dashboard as “Slug for browser extension”) to connect it to this talk.

Speechwave Chrome extension popup prompting for an API key before it's connected

5. Start a session

A session is one continuous run of your talk, from when you start presenting to when you stop. You start and stop sessions from the extension before and after your talk (not from the dashboard), and every reaction your audience sends while a session is active is recorded against it; outside a session, reactions still float on screen but aren’t saved. That record is what powers the analytics you review afterward: which reactions came in, and on which slide. Once you start a session, it appears on your dashboard, where you can check on it during and after your talk, and compare it against past sessions for the same talk.

Note: If a session is left running and never explicitly stopped (the extension crashes, or your laptop closes mid-talk) it is automatically closed after 4 hours so it doesn’t stay active indefinitely.

6. What happens during the talk

Your audience taps emoji on their phones as you speak. Each reaction floats up over your slides in real time, so you can see how the room is responding without breaking your flow. Behind the scenes, every reaction is tallied against whichever slide was showing when it was sent, building the slide-by-slide breakdown you’ll see in your session analytics afterward.

A Google Slides presentation with a floating cluster of emoji reactions in the bottom-right corner

Ready to go? Head to your dashboard and create your first talk, then connect the extension to start your first session.