Google Slides Q&A lets the audience ask and vote for questions

Google just added a handy new feature to its Slides presentation tool.

Dubbed suggestively Q&A, the feature lets the audience of a presentation raise questions that the presenter can see and reply to instantly. The idea is to encourage people to engage with presentations by removing that uncomfortable friction of having to speak in public. Some people are just shy, some people may be too embarrassed to asked a “dumb question,” while others may want to ask a question anonymously. These types of people can now engage in a more comfortable way with a simple tap.

Slides Q&A displays a short link at the top of the slide deck that people can tap on to add their questions. The audience can vote for questions they like and the presenter can sort questions by vote count, making it easier to address the issues that are actually relevant to the audience.

To showcase the new feature, the Slides team asked Shree Bose, who won the Google Science Fair for her research on drug resistance in ovarian cancer, to use Q&A during a presentation to an audience of 200 middle-schoolers. Shree had over 170 questions that garnered more than 800 votes, which is very impressive.

Slides has also received a new “laser pointer” feature and the ability to present slideshows over Hangouts on iOS.

The new features are already live on the web version of Slides, while getting them on the Android app is a simple as hitting the update button in Google Play.