On-the-fly Polling with AI (Stream Alive)

So I recently (just yesterday, from Myriam Hadnes) learned about this tool called Stream Alive (see privacy policy – GDPR compliant). The main thing Myriam told me is that it harvests the chat…

So here are the ways I’ve just practiced using it (in an actual workshop on Liberating Structures) successfully:

1. You let people type one word or phrase in chat (like “how are you feeling”) in chat, and it creates a word cloud. This is nice if you need to do this on the fly, or you don’t wanna waste time asking people to enter a code for Slido or Menti, you know? You can set it up to allow more than one response per person, or to take all the responses. I just realized my setup (or their default) was one response per person and I’ve just changed it because I am usually OK with multiple responses per person.
2. You let people type their location in chat, and it creates a map of where everyone is. It can only do maps of the world, US or India (I’m thinking the creators are in India, for this and some other reason I can’t remember now). This is simpler than asking people to annotate with the Zoom annotation function
3. You let people just keep going with whatever in the chat, and use the “quick questions” feature which harvests questions from the chat. Only things with a “?” in it, but I think I’ve also seen it harvest question WORDS like how/why/where etc even if you don’t put the question mark. However, it only shows 6 questions at a time – then if you delete one it will show you the others. You can turn it on and off at any time, from what I can see.
4. Polling without pre-set options: if you don’t know which choices participants will make, but still want to group together similar responses as a % of what everyone is saying – this could be really powerful!
5. I haven’t looked deeply at the stats/data that you end up with, but it’s something I look forward to

It’s free so far, and you CAN pre-create the list of questions you want, not just use it on the fly. It’s a bit odd in that sometimes there is a 2-step process to get it going, and also it’s odd that the way it works is as a participant in your Zoom! So be careful to make it a co-host and not send it to breakouts with anyone. That would be creepy!

There are a couple of things it does that are confusing for me. One spinwheel thingie that doesn’t seem to stop at the thing most people are writing about in the chat… and one regular polling thing with preset options – unsure why it is called a power poll. There is also a “transient thoughts” option that is not bad… it’s just highlighting things coming up in the chat in speech bubbles one at a time, but I don’t know how to stop it or slow it or navigate them… I may figure this out eventually if I don’t give up on it completely. And that’s it – those are all the options!

Have you used Stream Alive? How have you been using it? If you haven’t used it, do you think you might try it?

Header photo from raedon on Pixabay (Princes Pier Melbourne at sunset)