How Pulse works — from joining a room on your phone to running a workspace. Can't find it here? The full guide goes deeper.
Scan the QR code on the stage screen, or open the join link the organizer shares — that's it. No app, no account, nothing to install; the same page works whether you're in the room or watching remotely.
Ask anyone already in the room to tap the QR button in the top corner of their Pulse view — it brings up the same join QR and link to scan or copy. (You can only re-share a room you're already in.)
Yes — in Branding, set the QR's color and optionally embed your workspace logo in its center. The color is checked so it stays scannable on the white code card, and the same design is used on the stage screen and when someone re-shares the code in the room.
Passcode-protected events show the code on the stage screen; enter it once to join. If a room is locked, new people can't enter until the organizer unlocks it.
That's the organizer's choice per event. On anonymous events your identity is pseudonymized everywhere — to other attendees, staff, and even support. See Privacy & data.
Staff roles nest: owner ⊃ organizer ⊃ presenter. Every staff role can moderate the live room — the difference is who can configure the workspace.
Setup is a lifecycle pipeline — a stepper across the top walks you Define → Content → Rehearse/Test → QA → Run → Report, showing where you are and what's left; you pick a sub-section from the left and only that pane loads. Moderate is the live console a running event needs: drive the deck, work the Q&A queue, launch polls, and the Room instruments. A setting you edit in Setup applies live too (changes take effect immediately). Switch between the two anytime from the header.
Yes. On a live event, the Moderate panel responds to a presentation clicker (or the arrow / Page Up / Page Down keys) to move the room's slides — which also drives your PowerPoint if you've paired the add-in. Both the panel and the add-in show how many slides until the next engagement. Opening the room early to prep no longer runs the run-of-show clock — the timeline counts from the scheduled start. On a phone, the slide-focus view now has a full-screen button, pinch-to-zoom that magnifies only the slide, and prev/next to page through revealed slides.
Yes — live reactions from attendees float over the attendee preview on the Moderate screen, so you can feel the room in real time. (They appear as attendees actually react during a live event — a solo preview with no audience won't show any.) On the attendee's side, the slide-focus view keeps the slide fully visible with the controls always on screen (nothing slides around), all your reaction emoji are available, and pinch-to-zoom stays anchored where your fingers are — with a Reset view button (or a double-tap) to snap the zoom back. A mute button hides the polls, reactions and notifications when you just want to watch; the live poll prompt can be dismissed; pacing confirmations no longer sit over the controls; and turning your phone to landscape gives a clean, slide-only view (rotate back for the controls). From the PowerPoint add-in, starting an event checks whether you're on slide 1 (and offers to jump there), warns if you're about to start an event that has a test twin, and reconnects automatically if you reopen or reset the event.
The Moderate console runs your show as a control↔mirror split. Across the top, a run-of-show timeline pins to the top of the screen as you scroll: your agenda as proportional segments with a live marker, and each act's slides as tick marks — the current slide highlighted, titles on hover, and a click jumps the room there (events without an agenda get a plain slide track). A Slides toggle reveals the previous, current, and next slide as thumbnails when you want them. On the left are your live controls (slides, polls, questions, celebrations) — each card collapses, and a quick-jump bar under the timeline scrolls straight to any of them (and an active room notice shows right under the command bar, so nothing has to be hunted for mid-event). On the right, a live attendee preview in a phone frame shows exactly what your audience sees right now — in the event's actual interface (classic, slide-focus, white-label, whichever you chose) — and you can flip the panel between that live view and the incoming questions feed. By default the preview only mirrors the room, but an Act as participant switch lets you react, vote, chat and ask as a real participant to test the room live (posts show your name). A Join code button flashes the attendee QR without leaving the console. A Settings button now opens the full Setup controls in a slide-over drawer (no need to leave the live console); a Collapse/Expand all control folds every hand card at once (Slides leads on open); slide Back/Next ride in the command bar beside the live indicator; the run-of-show timeline shows every act's title in full; and the pane or section you're on is kept in the address bar, so a refresh or bookmark returns you right there.
Request a one-time sign-in ("magic") link by email, or set a password for quicker access later. Staff sign in; attendees never have to.
You have two fallbacks at the two-factor prompt: enter one of the recovery codes you saved when you turned it on, or choose Email me a code to receive a one-time code at your account's email address (valid for 10 minutes).
A workspace is your organization on Pulse — its events, members, branding, and plan. You can belong to several; switch between them from the console. Workspaces are fully isolated from one another.
In People, invite by email one at a time, or Import CSV for many at once (columns email, optional name and role). You can paste an address copied straight from Outlook or another mail client — the Name <name@company.com> form is accepted anywhere an email goes, in the single invite and in the CSV's email column. The import previews every row — invited, skipped (already a member or a duplicate), or an error with the reason — before you confirm. Owners can't be bulk-imported. The People list shows staff and pending invites together, with role, groups and access per person; use Manage on a row to change someone's role, access grants, or group memberships, or tick rows to remove members or cancel invites in bulk. Create and delete groups from + Group at the top; on a pending invite, the Resend menu can re-send the email or copy the invite link to share yourself.
Yes. Pulse keeps the original .pptx with your deck — staff can re-download it from the Library or the event's Slides card (look for Original .pptx). If you've built polls or a survey in Pulse, that menu also offers With engagement notes — the same deck with your engagements written into the speaker notes (the format the add-in reads back). It's staff-only, since the original can hold slides the room never saw. Decks connected live from the PowerPoint add-in keep their original too. When you let attendees download the deck at the end, they can pick PDF (built in their browser from the slides they saw), the original PowerPoint (only once the deck is fully revealed), or the slide images.
The current release number (e.g. v261) shows small at the bottom of the left rail — handy when reporting something. Every document now reads inside the console: open Guides & Docs and each one — Who it's for, the FAQ, the full guide, the demo walkthrough, Terms and Privacy — opens right in the reading pane, grouped under Background, Guides and Governance; Open as a full page still works if you'd rather see the standalone page.
All of it is under Admin now — one governance destination on the left rail (the shield). The old top-bar Settings gear is gone; its sections join Admin's own: Branding, Domain, Authentication, Org defaults, Connect AI, and Data & export. Old /settings links redirect there automatically. Org defaults is where you set — and optionally lock — a setting for every event in the workspace; a locked setting is enforced on all events and hidden from event-level editing.
Guides and legal now read inside the console: the Guide & docs destination (also the top-bar ?) is a chapter reader — Getting started, the event lifecycle, the agenda timeline, engagements, presenting from PowerPoint, and series — with the current slide of the app around it. Each chapter links out to the full page, and every document (Who it's for, FAQ, the guide, a demo walkthrough, Terms and Privacy) stays reachable from the reader. Full pages open in the same tab, so your browser Back button returns you to the app.
Open Plan & billing: the current plan, this period's usage, and your invoices are shown up front. Click Change plan to compare the tiers and switch. Switching is free and instant; a lower tier asks you to confirm first. The guided Demo plan is set up for you by our team and isn't something you switch into yourself. (A demo workspace keeps its plan fixed and can't delete its sample decks, so the showcase stays intact.)
Short link for any AI chat: nowpresenting.net/ai — one page that points an assistant at every integration path (deck notes, blueprint, MCP, the Claude skill).
Yes — and it's a great way to start. Pulse publishes an open event blueprint format: a JSON file that describes an entire event (agenda with timed segments, speakers, polls and quizzes, prepared Q&A, a survey, appearance). Hand your slides and the spec to an AI assistant you already use; it designs the event and returns a blueprint. In the console, choose Start from a blueprint and upload it — a fully built draft appears, ready to review and run. Pulse itself embeds no AI; it just defines the format so your AI can do the heavy lifting.
Yes. Point the AI helping you write slides at Author an enriched deck with AI — a page that teaches it Pulse's speaker-notes format. It interviews you, proposes a run-of-show and the engagements for each section, and gives you paste-ready notes blocks. When you import the deck (upload it, or push it from the PowerPoint add-in), the event arrives fully built: every slide named from its title, the timeline assembled from the sections, the polls and quizzes anchored, and the room preferences set. Editing the event afterward and re-downloading the deck writes your changes back into the notes.
Yes — an importable Pulse event-builder skill for Claude. Add it to Claude, share your slides, and it interviews you and returns a blueprint. The skill fetches our living spec each time it runs, so it always builds to the current format rather than an aging download. (It works with any capable AI — the skill just packages the workflow for Claude.)
It lives on our site and evolves with the product, so it never goes stale: the event-blueprint spec (with a machine-readable JSON Schema). If a blueprint has a problem, the import points at the exact field with a fix hint — paste that back to your AI and it corrects itself in one pass.
Yes. Pulse is an MCP server: in the console under Connect AI, create an access token and paste the ready-made config into Claude Code, Claude Desktop, or the API's MCP connector. Your AI can then build and edit draft events and read reports directly — no copy-paste of blueprint files. It works with the same one blueprint format, and it can't run the live room (advancing slides, launching polls, moderating stay human-run) or delete anything. Give a token Read only or Build & edit, set an expiry, and revoke it anytime. Full tool reference: the MCP server reference. (claude.ai web custom connectors, which need OAuth, aren't supported yet.)
Pro plans reserve a branded subdomain (yourname.nowpresenting.net) that goes live automatically — no DNS to set up. Enterprise plans connect a custom domain (events.yourbrand.com): verify ownership, add the two DNS records shown, then click Enable serving. Both are under Admin → Custom domain.
Yes — under Setup → Content → Attendee view, pick an Attendee view per event from a gallery of interfaces: Classic (tabs, cards and modules — the full room), Slide focus (a slide-first view where the deck fills the screen and controls float over it on glass), White-label (heavy tenant branding with minimal Pulse chrome), and more as we add them. Each interface has its own setup card — the picker shows the right options for whichever view you choose — and every view keeps its own settings when you switch between them. Slide-first views use your workspace's brand colors and fall back to Classic until a deck is added.
Early access (Setup → Define → Access) lets waiting attendees answer a launched poll, fill the survey, or browse the slides you've revealed — before you go live. Each is off by default; turn on only what you want available in the lobby. Rehearsal stays staff-only and separate.
Yes. In setup → Content → Slides, hover (or tap) any slide thumbnail and choose Replace to swap just that image. Your slide order, the reveal position, stage-QR pins, and agenda slide-ranges all stay put — only that one slide changes.
Yes. In Moderate → Room → Breakout rooms, name your rooms and pick whether attendees choose a room or you shuffle them in randomly. While breakouts are open, each attendee's chat is scoped to their room; closing them returns everyone to the main channel.
Yes. On any ended event, choose Run again — it creates a fresh draft with all your setup (polls, questions, agenda, speakers, slides, appearance) copied over, and moves the join link to the new run. The old run keeps its report.
Live reactions, raise-hand, pacing feedback (slow down / speed up / repeat), free-flow chat, moderated Q&A with upvotes, and polls, quizzes, icebreakers and word clouds (attendees submit one word, aggregated into a live cloud you can moderate — and optionally let them tap an existing word to upvote it) and videos (a YouTube clip you launch at any moment) with live or after-close results. Each is a toggle in setup. There are also celebration effects — fireworks, confetti, cheers, hearts, balloons or sparkles that play a full-screen animation on every attendee device and the stage screen. Fire one straight from Moderate for a spontaneous moment, or add it as an engagement and anchor it to a slide (say, fireworks on your closing slide). Effects play over whatever's on screen, so they never interrupt an open poll, and they respect reduced-motion settings.
Setup is a lifecycle pipeline — a stepper across the top walks you Define → Content → Rehearse/Test → QA → Run → Report, showing where you are and what's left in each stage. Pick a sub-section from the left menu and only that pane loads; the stepper and menu stay put as you scroll.
Yes. In event setup, pick a reaction set — default, minimal, energetic, professional, classroom, celebration, focus, sports, or hearts — or choose Custom and tap your own 3–8 emoji from the curated picker (the order you tap is the order attendees see). You also set a control size (X-Small / Small / Medium / Large) for the one-tap buttons. The server only accepts reactions from the set that's in effect.
Yes. Give any agenda segment its own reaction set, and the attendee buttons swap automatically as you move through the run-of-show — so a Q&A block can show 🙋 ✋ ❓ while a celebration moment shows 🥳 🎉 👏. Because segments carry the speaker, this also lets reactions differ per presenter. Leave a segment's set blank to use the event's default.
Yes, two ways. For ambient playback, event setup under Content → Video has two slots: before the event (the lobby screen while people wait) and after (the ended screen, below the survey). To play a clip during the event, add a Video engagement (Content → Engagements → Add → Video) and launch it from Moderate at any moment — it behaves like any engagement (one on screen at a time, and you can anchor it to a slide to auto-fire). Every video has a choice: start automatically (it plays muted, since phones and browsers block sound-on autoplay — viewers tap for sound), or let the viewer press play, which waits for their tap so it can start with sound. Videos show only on attendees' devices, not the projected stage, and people can close them anytime.
Yes. On a draft event, hit Start rehearsal (in setup or the moderate view). While it's rehearsing, you and your staff can open the join link on another device and experience the real attendee view — react, chat, answer a poll, page through the slides — while the room stays closed to the audience. A clear "Rehearsal — the room isn't open yet" banner shows the whole time. When you're ready, Open the room (go live): the run-through is wiped clean (chat, questions, poll answers, reactions, and the slide position all reset) so the audience starts fresh. Your agenda, decks, and prepared questions stay. Rehearsals never count toward your usage.
Yes — set a start (and optional end) time. Pulse flips it live at the start and ends it at the end; attendees see a countdown until it begins. Manual go-live/end always wins. The end has to be after the start — setup won't let you save an earlier end, and an imported blueprint with a backwards schedule is rejected.
Yes — turn on Presentation timer under Setup → Define → Room rules. A subtle timer then appears on the presenter, stage and moderate screens: time elapsed since you went live, and — if you set a scheduled end — the time remaining, which turns amber in the last five minutes. Attendees never see it.
Yes. From the moderate view's Room notice card, push a countdown or announcement to every device at once — Intermission ends in N min, Session ends in N min (or at the scheduled end), Next session starting, or a custom message. Attendees see a banner with a live mm:ss countdown that dismisses itself at zero; the stage screen shows a large timer. Extend +5 pushes the scheduled end back five minutes (the auto-end scheduler honors the new time) and announces it. Clear it any time.
Yes. In event setup, pick a Next session from your workspace. When this event ends, attendees (after the survey, if you have one) see an Up next card: if the next session is already live they get a Join now button; if it's scheduled they see a live countdown that flips to Join the moment it starts — no refresh. Passcode and lock rules on the next session still apply. Nobody is ever teleported automatically. Moderators and presenters get quick links to open the next session's setup/moderate/present views.
Yes. On a scheduled event's setup page, hit Add to calendar (.ics) to download a standard calendar invite. It carries the join link, the passcode (it's a staff file), and quick links to the setup, moderate, present, and stage views — plus the branded join QR embedded right in the invite, so it's on your phone at the podium. Works with Apple Calendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, and anything else that reads .ics.
Yes. The Events list has a List / Calendar toggle; the calendar places each scheduled event on its day in your timezone, with month navigation and a marker on today. Click any event to jump into its setup. Events without a scheduled date are listed under the grid. List stays the default view.
A lobby: the event title, a live countdown to the scheduled start, and — unless you turn it off — a preview of the agenda (segments, speakers, planned minutes) and speaker cards (name, title, bio). It's the same page they're already waiting on, so they join automatically the moment you go live. Toggle it with "Show agenda before start" in the agenda editor (on by default; off shows just the countdown).
The Agenda & timeline section is a Tracks + Rundown builder: a time bar where each act's width tracks its planned minutes (drag a boundary to move minutes between adjacent acts, or zoom the scale), and a slide-by-slide rundown grouped by act with your deck thumbnails, a per-act speaker, and editable slide titles. Drag an engagement from the tray onto the slide that should launch it, and use Print agenda for a clean run-of-show sheet.
Yes. Each supporting link can be shown manually (you toggle it live), for the whole event, while a speaker is on, or during a segment. Attached links follow the run-of-show automatically — as you advance the deck into a speaker's or segment's part of the agenda, their links appear and then tuck away again, with no manual toggling. A link tied to a speaker who's later removed simply falls back to showing for the whole event.
Yes. Attach a resource to a slide ("after slide N"); it opens in the attendee's Info tab the moment the presenter passes that slide and then stays available. A resource can be a link, a short text note or definition (no URL needed), or both — and it carries a "Slide N" chip that jumps the viewer back to that slide.
Yes. In event setup, add an agenda of segments — intro, each speaker, intermissions, closing — and optionally tie a segment to a speaker and a slide range. When you present, advancing into a segment's slides highlights it automatically (the stage shows "Now: <segment> — <speaker>"), or an moderator can set the current segment by hand.
Two ways. For a workspace-wide default, go to Workspace → Branding → QR code and set the code color and whether to embed your logo — a live preview shows the result. To style the QR for a single event, open that event's setup and hit Customize QR in the Join card; those overrides fall back to the workspace default when you leave them blank, and apply everywhere the event's QR appears (the stage screen, the in-room re-share, and the calendar invite). Want the classic high-contrast look back? Tap Black next to the color picker to set a plain black code.
Yes. Each speaker can carry up to six links — LinkedIn, website, X, GitHub, a custom link, or an email (which opens the attendee's mail app). They appear on the speaker cards in the lobby and the Info tab. For safety only https links and email addresses are accepted — insecure or script-style URLs are rejected — and every outbound link opens in a new tab with no referrer leakage.
Yes. Upload a PDF (or images) in event setup — your browser renders it to static slides, so there are no animations or video, just the grounded slide. You (or an moderator) advance them from the presenter or moderate view, or from the stage screen; attendees see each slide on their phones in sync. The presenter can drive the deck straight from Pulse, or an moderator can advance it for the audience while the speaker presents from anything else.
Yes. On the Present view of a live event, tap Phone remote to show a pairing QR (or a short code). Scan it with any phone and you get simple Back / Next buttons plus a Blank screen toggle for the projector — no app or sign-in, it works over the web. The remote drives the deck through exactly the same path as the on-screen controls, so the room stays in sync. The code is single-use and stops working when the event ends.
A PowerPoint add-in that advances Pulse from within PowerPoint (and uploads your open deck in one click) is coming. Pulse is already prepared on the server side for it. Today, use the phone remote above to advance slides, and upload your deck (PDF, images, or a PowerPoint if your instance has the converter) in event setup.
No. In the Library, use Upload deck and choose a PowerPoint or PDF: a PDF uploads as-is, and a PowerPoint converts to a PDF automatically when your instance has the converter enabled — either way the deck lands in your library on a new draft event, ready to open. You can also drop a PowerPoint directly onto the Slides uploader in event setup and it's converted in place. If the converter isn't set up on your instance, upload a PDF instead — export it from PowerPoint yourself (File → Save As → PDF), which the app walks you through — so it's never a dead end. Conversion happens on the server via an optional service; the core app keeps no office-document dependency. You can also reuse a deck from the library on an existing event (Event → Slides → Reuse a deck from the library, or the library's Use in…), and replacing a deck always shows the new slides immediately.
If the organizer enables it, attendees can download the slides after the event ends (just the slides that were shown) — optionally only once they've completed the post-event survey. Staff can always download the full deck.
Yes — live, from the moderate view's Stage QR controls (in the Slides card). Turn it on or off, pick which corner it sits in, or pin a position for a specific slide so a QR that would cover a chart tucks away just for that slide and comes back after. Pins are part of the event, so any positions you set during a rehearsal carry straight into the live run.
Yes. On the Slides settings, turn on "Only show slides to people in the room." Pulse learns the venue's network automatically from your stage, presenter, and moderator devices (an organizer can also type a known venue IP). Attendees on that network see the slides; anyone off it doesn't — and it's enforced on the server, not just hidden. One honest caveat the app also shows attendees: a phone on cellular data is on a different network, so it may need to join the venue Wi-Fi to count as "in the room." We match on a per-event hash of the network address and never store raw IPs.
No — and that's enforced on the server, not just hidden. Attendees can page back through slides already shown (with a "Back to live" button to rejoin), but a slide the room hasn't reached yet simply isn't served to them, so upcoming quiz answers or reveals never leak.
Yes. On your phone, pinch or double-tap a slide to zoom in (drag to pan; double-tap again to reset). A reaction strip sits right under the slide so you can react without leaving the view. If you page back to re-read something, a "Live · slide N" pill shows where the presenter is now — tap it to jump back to live.
Yes. On the Slides tab there's a "Hide slides on this device" option; the tab disappears and stays hidden on that device until you tap Show slides again. Your reactions, questions, and other controls always live on the Home tab.
Yes. In Setup → Content → Attendee view (or live from the moderator view), reorder the attendee tabs — Home, Slides, Chat, Q&A, Info — with the up/down controls. It changes the order only; a tab still appears only when its feature is turned on, so reordering can never hide something.
Yes — the most recent closed poll's results show on Home, and an "Earlier results" section lists the rest (for polls whose results the organizer made visible). Live quizzes still show you how you did.
Every event produces an end-of-event report: headline stats — including peak attendance, poll participation, average survey rating, and per-attendee watch time — plus per-poll results, a reaction breakdown, an engagement-over-time chart, and a timeline, with a CSV export. Owners and organizers also get it by email when the event ends. It's aggregate-only, never a per-person log.
Yes — share a QA review link and a reviewer can preview the whole event at their own pace, on any device. A phase bar walks them through pre-event (the real lobby), live, and post-event (the real ended screen and survey). The Attendee view shows the actual attendee surface in the exact style the event will use — classic or slide focus — and firing an engagement plays it just as an attendee would see it (a video engagement plays inline). It's a private simulation: nothing they do is recorded or shown to anyone. The You drive it view adds a desktop split (slide expanded, engagements listed) for driving through fast. Multiple reviewers can link up and follow the same cursor together. The page now separates its two controls so they stop looking alike — a progress line for where you are in the event (Before · Live · After) and a boxed switch for who you're viewing as (you, or an attendee) — with one Private preview badge instead of repeated disclaimers, and every engagement fired from a single list.
By default attendees get the slides that were actually shown — so if you skip ahead, they get fewer pages than the deck has (the button now says exactly how many). Turn on Set up → Deck download → Give attendees the full deck to hand over every slide instead; leave it off for quiz decks with hidden answers. Separately, guest access now defaults to on for new workspaces (existing workspaces keep their saved default — change it in Settings → Defaults), and when an event goes live the Moderate console shows a one-tap started settings strip (Show slides, Allow guests, Reactions, Q&A, Chat) so the common mistakes are fixable without leaving the room. Before an event starts, the projected Stage screen now shows your agenda; engagements only appear once you're live.
A Series is a multi-day, multi-room program — a conference, a cohort, a full-day summit — built on top of your existing events. Its agenda holds items across days and rooms: keynotes, breaks, lunch, networking, and selectable sessions attendees sign up for. Each item can link to a live event, so a Series ties your rooms together without changing how any one event runs. It's a separate builder — your sessions and setup stay exactly as they are.
Series is an enterprise-plan feature. Once it's on, a Series tab appears in your workspace. Owners and organizers can manage series; you can also delegate it to a presenter with the series-organizer permission without promoting their whole role.
Invite a cohort by pasting emails (one per line, or "Name <email>") — each person gets a private link to view the agenda and choose sessions; no account required. Or turn on open registration and the public series page offers a name + email form. Re-inviting someone refreshes their link.
Give any selectable item a capacity. Attendees Join or Leave from their agenda; once an item is full, the next person can join the waitlist and sees their live position ("Waitlist · #3"). When someone leaves, the seat is offered to the first person on the waitlist automatically (they're emailed if a mailer is set up). Organizers can open any item's roster to see who's in and who's waiting, and assign anyone directly — an assignment can go over capacity when the organizer chooses.
Their agenda highlights a Happening now strip when a linked room goes live, with a Join now button, plus an Up next line. The whole agenda also prints cleanly for a paper program.
Yes. Pulse for PowerPoint is a small add-in that runs inside PowerPoint and tells your event which slide you're on — so attendees' phones, the stage screen, slide-linked polls and quizzes, and the post-event timeline all follow your real slideshow with nothing to click mid-talk. Open your event's Present view, find the pairing code under Remote & PowerPoint, type it into the Pulse task pane in PowerPoint, and start your show. Setup and sideload steps are at nowpresenting.net/ppt-addin.
Yes — the pane's Use this deck button sends your open .pptx straight
into the event (converted to slides server-side), so you don't have to export a PDF first. It's
refused while the event is live, exactly like any deck replace. If your instance doesn't have slide
conversion set up, the pane tells you to export to PDF and upload that instead.
Yes. Write an engagement in a slide's speaker notes (see the slide-notes syntax), or build it in Pulse and use Copy for slide notes to paste it in. When you push the deck, Pulse creates or updates each engagement and anchors it to its slide — so reordering slides in PowerPoint doesn't break anything. It even lets an AI build the engagements as it builds the deck. To fix an engagement mid-event, use Push engagements only — it updates the polls without touching the running slides.
More than the slides — whether you upload the .pptx in Pulse or push it from the add-in,
the same thing happens. Pulse reads each slide's title (to name it in the run-of-show,
instead of "Slide 1, Slide 2"), the engagements in your speaker notes, a
run-of-show from [pulse:act] blocks that mark where each section begins, and
room preferences from a [pulse:session] block on the title slide. Re-downloading
the deck (Original .pptx → With engagement notes) writes your Pulse edits back into the
notes. The full format, with an AI authoring workflow, is at
Author an enriched deck with AI.
A few recent touches: re-importing a deck replaces its engagements instead of blending the
old and new deck (anything you built by hand in Pulse is kept); the upload shows honest step-by-step
progress and no longer looks finished while it is still uploading; each engagement can fire
when you reach its slide or when you leave it (trigger=enter / trigger=exit),
and you can drop a ready-made “engagement coming” notice onto a
slide to prepare the room; and starting the event from the add-in points you to Moderate and begins
on slide 1.
Run the whole event from the pane: start and end it, step slides, toggle room controls (reactions, chat, Q&A…), and post a room notice (a break, "ending soon", an announcement). If you close the event by accident, Run again reopens it. A connection monitor shows whether the link is healthy, and the add-in updates itself — you never re-download it.
Yes — Pulse serves a chromeless live frame you can embed right in a slide with PowerPoint's free Web Viewer add-in (also works in Google Slides or an OBS browser source). Grab the link from the PowerPoint add-in's Show live on a slide card, or from event setup → Stage & delivery; pick a live poll, word cloud, reactions, or the combined view. One embedded link keeps working across every engagement in your talk, updating as the room responds. You can also embed one specific engagement — each poll, quiz and word cloud now has its own results link in that setup card, so a slide can show exactly the engagement it belongs to. And a transparent reactions overlay link shows only the live reactions on a see-through page, to layer over slide content (it works reliably in Google Slides and OBS; PowerPoint's Web Viewer may draw its own background). See Show live results on a slide.
Yes. Every deck upload or PowerPoint push is kept as a version in your workspace Library; its Advanced tab shows the history and lets you restore a prior version or delete a deck — though a deck that's linked to a scheduled, live, or completed event is protected from deletion.
Seven presets. Dark: Ember (default), Slate, Forest, Ocean, and Midnight. Light: Daylight and Daybreak. Set them under Branding → Theme; add your own accent color on top.
Yes. A workspace has a console theme (what staff see) and a separate meeting theme (what attendees see) — and any single event can override the meeting theme just for itself. So your back-office can stay dark while the audience sees your branded light theme, or vice-versa.
Pulse often runs in a darkened room, with a phone held close to someone's face. Midnight is tuned for exactly that: a deep near-black ground that saves OLED power, ink dimmed just off pure-white to stop bloom in the dark, and a calm indigo accent that doesn't glare up close. Daybreak is its light-room counterpart with the same identity.
Yes, and it's enforced: every preset (and every custom accent) must clear WCAG AA contrast, or the app won't ship it. Poll and result charts keep a fixed, color-vision-safe palette regardless of theme, so results stay readable for everyone.
Pulse is in an open beta. It's fully usable, but we're deliberately benchmarking capacity against real usage rather than scaling ahead of demand — so you may hit limits (concurrent events, attendees, throughput) or brief slowdowns during this stage, and we're tuning as we learn. For a high-stakes event, keep a fallback plan. See the Terms for details.
Pulse includes a free plan with usage limits — concurrent live events, attendees per event, and data-retention window — shown under Plan & usage. Paid plans raise those limits; upgrading opens a secure checkout and a self-serve billing portal. If a payment lapses, your data is never deleted for it — limits simply apply again at the next go-live after a grace period.
A Demo workspace lets you explore the whole product hands-on. Every feature is switched on, and it comes pre-loaded with example events (including a finished one with a full report) so there's always something to try. To keep demos self-contained it stays deliberately small: up to 5 attendees per event, events end automatically after 20 minutes, and it's a single-person workspace. Its join links and QR codes always contain the word "demo". A guided walkthrough introduces each screen the first time you open it — reopen it any time from the ? guide button — and a Reset demo content button on the Events page puts the sample events back to their starting state. To keep the showcase intact, a demo workspace can't delete its seeded decks or change its plan.
Owners and organizers manage people — inviting teammates, changing roles, creating groups, and approving join requests. Presenters and assistants see the roster read-only. Only an owner can grant or remove the owner role. (Assistant is treated as organizer-level, so in practice the access levels are presenter, organizer, and owner.)
Per event, the organizer chooses named or anonymous. On anonymous events every view — attendee, staff, and support — shows pseudonyms, never real identities.
Event content is kept for your plan's retention window after an event ends, then hard-deleted; the event's aggregate summary is kept for your history. You can export a session's template anytime, and export or delete a whole workspace.
Not by default. Operators have no standing access; support can only act inside your workspace after an owner or organizer grants a time-limited "assist" session, which is visible to you and fully audited. Details in the Privacy Policy.
Only if a moderator turns on Attendee diagnostics for an event (it's off by default). When on, each attendee gets a small wrench icon that opens a panel showing exactly what their device reports — nothing hidden: connection state, round-trip time to the server, how many times they reconnected, coarse device/platform, screen size, the app build, and time in the room. That same sample goes to the moderator's live view so they can spot who's struggling. It's technical connection health, not content — no messages, reactions, or answers — and it follows the event's anonymity setting. Turn the setting off and the icon, the reporting, and the endpoint all go away.
The companion app can download an event or series ahead of time so the venue's network isn't the bottleneck — but downloading it early never means seeing it early. Every slide is stored on the device as ciphertext; the app only holds the encrypted bytes. The key that unlocks a slide is released by the Pulse server as the presenter shows that slide — nothing before it's live, and nothing beyond where the presenter has reached. A copied cache, a modified app, or a phone with the clock changed still can't unlock anything, because the timing decision lives on our server, never on the device. It's the same reveal rule the web attendees follow, applied to an offline cache.
Pulse ships as a single self-contained container. docker run -p 5170:8080 gives you a full working demo with no external services. Production runs the same image with your choice of sign-in (a shared host key, a reverse proxy / SSO, or first-party accounts). The demo path always works with zero configuration. See the guide for deployment.
Check spam/junk first. Brand-new sender domains are sometimes filtered by the receiving mail system (e.g. a corporate Microsoft 365 quarantine) even when delivery succeeded — ask your mail admin to release it or allow-list the sender. You can also set a password once you're in, to skip email next time.
Check whether the room is locked (unlock it in setup) or the event hasn't gone live yet, and that they're using the current QR/link — the re-share button always shows the live one.
Accent colors must stay legible on the theme's background (a contrast floor). Pick a brighter or darker shade; the live preview in Branding shows the result before you save.
Pulse is built and operated by Memon Strategy LLC. The company is the provider named in the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, and holds the copyright to the software. © 2026 Memon Strategy LLC. All rights reserved.
Yes. Your product name, tagline, accent colors and logo are yours to set in workspace branding, and the in-room screens your audience sees carry your identity — not ours. The company attribution stays here and in the legal pages rather than on your event surfaces.
A native iOS/Android companion app is coming — it pre-caches an event or series so attendees on crowded venue wifi load instantly, then follows the live event. It's built as a separate project on top of a sync platform that's already part of Pulse (secure device pairing, encrypted content packages, server-gated slide reveal). The app supports white-label, so a corporate event provider can ship it under their own brand. Today you don't need an app at all: the join link opens the full attendee experience in any phone browser, no install.