Manage audience Q&A during a live session

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Riverside’s built-in Q&A feature helps you gather audience insights, prioritize questions at scale, and respond without disrupting the flow of your live session. Flag chat messages to build a question queue, reply in writing or live on screen, and keep everything organized in one accessible panel.

IMPORTANT:
Q&A is only available for sessions with both audience registration and live stream chat enabled.

Adjust Q&A settings

Before going live, you can choose whether to display unanswered questions and enable or disable automatic question detection.

• Enable or disable the display of unanswered questions in the Q&A tab.

  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer

  2. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.

  3. Click Public chat.

  4. In the chat panel, click the Settings icon.

  5. Next to Show all questions, click the toggle to turn it on.
  → When the toggle is on, the Q&A tab will display all audience questions, including those that haven’t been answered.

  → When the toggle is off, the Q&A tab will display only answered questions. Other submitted will only be visible to the host an producers. 

• Enable automatic question detection to ensure audience questions aren’t missed. 

  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer

  2. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.

  3. Click Public chat.

  4. In the chat panel, click the Settings icon.

  5. Next to Auto-detect questions, click the toggle to turn it on.

  When the toggle is on, messages containing a question mark are automatically flagged and added to the Q&A tab.
   

Mark or unmark a message as a question

Manually mark messages as questions to add them to the Q&A queue, or unmark ones that don’t need to be addressed.

• If an audience member submits a question that isn’t automatically detected as one, you can manually mark it as a question to add it to the Q&A queue.
  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer
  2. Start the live session.
  3. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.
  4. Click Public chat.
  5. Hover over the message you want to mark as a question.
  6. Click the Mark as question icon.
     The message is moved to the Q&A tab.
• If a message was manually or automatically marked as a question but doesn't need to be addressed in the Q&A, you can unmark it.
  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer
  2. Start the live session.
  3. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.
  4. Click Public chat.
  5. Hover over the question you want to unmark.
  6. Click the Mark as question icon.
     The question is removed from the Q&A tab.

Reply to a question

You can answer an audience member’s question directly in the chat, or display a question on screen so your audience can follow along as you answer it live.

• You can answer an audience member’s question directly in the chat. This allows you to provide quick, written responses to questions without interrupting the flow of the live conversation. 
  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer
  2. Start the live session.
  3. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.
  4. Click Public chat.
  5. Hover over the question you want to reply to.
  6. Click the Reply icon.
  7. Type your answer.
  8. Click Reply.
• Display a question on screen so your audience can follow along as you answer it live.
  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer
  2. Start the live session.
  3. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.
  4. Click Public chat.
  5. Hover over the question you wan to display on screen.
  6. Next to Show, click the current time value to select how long the question will be displayed.
  7. Click Show.
     The question is displayed on screen to all viewers.
  8. To stop displaying the question before the time is up, click Stop showing.
• You can edit your response or remove it completely if it was sent by mistake or is no longer relevant.
  1. Join a scheduled studio session as a host or producer
  2. Start the live session.
  3. From the studio sidebar, click Chat.
  4. Click Public chat.
  5. Hover over the answer you want to edit or remove.
  6. Click the Three dots.

  7. Select Edit to update your response, or Remove to delete it.

      

Learn more

• Ask a question during a live session (for audience members)
• Audience registration: Overview
• Share your screen in the studio
• Upload and share a presentation