Question Desk

Anonymous audience questions, grouped and translated.

I built this for the Autism Society of Los Angeles, where question time ran on a roving microphone. The same question would get asked three times in two languages, and plenty of people never put their hand up at all. People now ask from their phones, Gemini groups and translates the questions as they arrive, and the facilitator works from topics rather than a list.

At an event

Scan the QR code on the screen in the room and type your question. There is no app to install and no account to create, and your name is not attached to anything you send.

Questions can be asked in any language. The page itself reads in English, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Tagalog or Armenian.

Running a session

  • QA Facilitators and administrators sign in with your organization's own account.
  • Gemini detects the language, translates, and assigns a topic in one call, so the translation costs nothing beyond the grouping.
  • The app itself reads in English, Spanish or Korean, set per person. That covers the queue, the admin pages and the emails as well as the questions.
  • The live code goes on a slide with the PowerPoint add-in, which saves running a second screen.

Where the questions live

It runs inside your own Workspace account or on your own WordPress server, so there is no third party holding the questions. Participants are anonymous, and nobody sees another person's question until a facilitator puts it on screen.

What it looks like

These are the real pages with example data, from the room, from a phone and from the facilitator's side.

A room screen showing a large QR code, the words Scan to ask a question in three languages, and a banner with the question being answered.
The room screen. Goes on the projector in your organization's colours. For in-room sessions the code rotates every 150 seconds, so a photo of it passed around afterwards is worth very little, and the banner shows what is being answered in every language the session runs.
The QA Facilitator queue: questions grouped under topics like Respite care hours, each with a question to read out, translations, and Answered and Dismiss buttons.
The facilitator's queue. Questions arrive in whatever language people typed them in and come back grouped, translated, and with one merged question to read out. Twenty people asking the same thing is one card you answer once. Approving a topic puts it on everyone's phones, where people tap Me too instead of asking it again.
The participant page on a phone: language buttons, a box to type a question, and a list of topics other people are asking about.
Asking, from a phone. Scanning the code opens the page, and sending a question takes one box and one button. The page reads in the languages the session offers, and people can tap Me too on something somebody else has already raised.
A PowerPoint slide showing the live Question Desk QR code.
On a PowerPoint slide. The add-in puts the live code on a slide so it keeps rotating through the slideshow. Codes print as well, one page per session, for the rooms where the projector is already spoken for.

Two ways to run it

Both versions are supported and share the same pages, so a session moves between them without being rebuilt.

Google Workspace

A Google Apps Script web app inside your own Workspace account. Nothing to host and nothing to pay for, though you will need a Gemini API key for the grouping.

How to set it up

WordPress plugin

For organizations that would rather run it on their own site. Staff are WordPress users and the questions live in your database.

Download the plugin ยท Install guide