New Capabilities Demonstrated at InfoComm 2019

ORLANDO, Fla. — Biamp announced a host of new features for its revolutionary Crowd Mics™ audience engagement solution that creates an extraordinary collaboration experience between presenters and live audiences. Crowd Mics transforms every smartphone and tablet into a personal microphone and interactive response system via a free iOS or Android app, eliminating the need to pass handheld microphones around the room, creating a truly dynamic, audience-centered interactive presentation or event. At InfoComm 2019, Biamp (booth 3742) is demonstrating the expanded capabilities of the latest Crowd Mics update (v 1.1), including additional user interface (UI) improvements, new poll graph types, customization options, and a new way to experience the moderator application.

“Until now, audiences of presentations and events have had limited and generally unsatisfying options for contributing or participating,” remarked Biamp’s Executive Vice President, Corporate Development, Joe Andrulis. “Crowd Mics changes all that. The easy-to-use system connects the audience to the presenters using something they know and love: their own smartphone or tablet. The new features we are announcing and demonstrating at InfoComm build on the outstanding functionality of the original system, adding great usability enhancements for presenters and attendees.”

Crowd Mics is the premier interactive presentation system tailored specifically to include presentation participants in a collaborative, natural way. Using the Crowd Mics app, audience members can ask questions by voice or text and participate in live discussions from the comfort of their personal mobile device. The system notifies the moderator when an audience member wants to speak, sends a personal notification to attendees’ devices when it’s their turn, and broadcasts their voice through the room’s AV system. If a participant is reluctant to speak, he can text his question to the moderator. The system also supports real-time polling, adding a richer level of engagement and interaction.

Crowd Mics lets presenters connect to their audiences on a personal level. Presenters access its capabilities from either the moderator app on their mobile device or via a newly introduced web interface. Both versions of the moderator experience feature the same look and feel, providing full control over conversations and interactions with audience members while capturing the number of attendees participating. The app’s audience response and engagement tools include the ability to select who will speak next, select and turn off an attendee mic, create polls before an event or in real time, and publish comments and poll results in a variety of graph types to the room's display system.

Designed for presentations, lectures, panel discussions, and other presenter/audience events, Crowd Mics is hosted on a small hardware appliance — the ATOM — that supports up to 1,000 event participants. The ATOM connects directly to the room's audio system via USB or balanced audio outputs, includes the option to present video via HDMI, and provides moderators full access to the event's participation log, including questions asked and poll results. Organizations can also brand the event experience by adding a custom logo that will appear on the moderator, participant, and display screens. Like other Biamp devices, Crowd Mics can be easily managed through Biamp's SageVue™ browser-based monitoring and management platform.

The 1.1 release of Crowd Mics will be available in Q3  2019 and will be a free update for existing Crowd Mics users. More information on Biamp’s full product portfolio is available at www.biamp.com.