Voice-triggered polls without Slido: a faster way to poll an audience

Polling an audience mid-talk should take five seconds. Instead, most tools make you leave your slides, open a tab, type the question, type the options, push it to the audience, and then come back. By the time you're done the room has checked out.

How TA pilot compares to Slido

The typical Slido flow during a live talk looks like this:

• Alt-tab to Slido
• Click "Create poll"
• Type the question
• Type options A, B, C
• Click "Publish"
• Alt-tab back to slides
• Ask the room to open the Slido link

TA pilot replaces that with a single sentence. You say something like:

"Let's vote — do you think we should ship this feature: yes, no, or maybe?"

TA pilot's sidebar picks up the sentence through your tab audio, sends it to Gemini Flash to extract the question and options, and pushes the poll to every audience member's phone in about two seconds. Results stream back to your sidebar as people tap.

Why two seconds matters

Live polls are only useful when the room is still with you. If the friction to start one is 30 seconds, you'll skip them. If it's two seconds, you'll use them three times a talk.

How it works under the hood

1. You tap the Poll button in the sidebar (or the extension listens

continuously if you've flipped on auto-capture)

1. Your voice is streamed as base64 audio to a Next.js API route
2. The route proxies to Gemini 2.5 Flash via OpenRouter with a JSON-mode

prompt that asks for { question, options: [{value, label}] }

1. The JSON comes back, a new session_events row lands in Supabase
2. Every connected participant page sees the poll via Supabase realtime
3. Tap results aggregate back into the sidebar's poll card

The whole round-trip sits under two seconds because Gemini Flash is fast and the whole stack runs on Vercel's edge.

When to use voice polls vs. written polls

Voice polls are great for:

• Quick sentiment checks ("who's used X before?")
• Driving conversation ("which of these should we do first?")
• Pop quizzes at the end of a section

Written polls (the kind you pre-load into your deck) are still better for:

• Complex questions with nuanced options
• Polls where the wording really matters
• Anything you want in a blog recap after the talk

Want to try it?

Install TA pilot, start a session, share your screen. Speak the poll and watch it land on every phone in the room.