SpeakApp
brainstorming meetings online

User Guide

This guide should help you to use SpeakApp most effectively. You may find the topic you are interested in by using your browser interface (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F). At any time in the application you can invoke a contextual help by pressing F1 or by clicking Help link in the footer.

If you cannot find a relevant answer here or you have some questions, please contact us.

Requirements

Web browser

The officially supported browsers are the latest stable versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari, but our users seamlessly run SpeakApp in Edge, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, Iron, Brave and other web browsers as well. Basically, any HTML5 browser with full WebRTC support is considered a web browser.

Network and firewall

To join a meeting, you have to allow all network traffic (both TCP and UDP) to destination ports 443 and 3478 to at least the following IP addresses: 144.202.52.207, 198.199.90.105, and 167.172.252.218. You may have a specific option on your firewall or router to enable WebRTC/VoIP applications like SpeakApp. On most routers, the default settings are sufficient.

Audio equipment

It goes without saying you have to have some microphone and speakers, headphones or earphones to be able to speak up and hear other participants. You can test your audio setup anytime.

Before a Meeting

This section describes the main user interface available after logging in.

Meetings

Here you can browse present, future and past meetings from all the communities you have subscribed to. You may sort the meetings by name, time and community name by clicking on the respective table header. Ongoing meetings are highlighted in red as you can see below.

Clicking the meeting will trigger the following popover:

Please note, that not all of the action buttons have to be present. If no action can be taken, there are no buttons, only the link to join the meeting selected automatically upon opening the popover so you can easily copy it to the clipboard using the copy button next to the link or by pressing Ctrl+C or Cmd+C.

Join

Press it to join the selected meeting. You will be redirected directly to the meeting if it is ready. If not, you will have to wait few minutes, but not more than five.

Edit

Click it to edit selected meeting. The form is the same as the booking form, except for action buttons (you can delete the meeting, save or discard changes). Editing does not change the link to join the meeting.

End now

Ends selected meeting immediately. The button is present only if the meeting has been booked by you or within a community you manage. After closing the meeting you will be asked if you would like to book the next meeting in the series.

Booking

Here you can book a meeting by filling the form and then submitting it. Meeting description will be advertised to the participants when they join.

There are two kinds of meetings, with and without a moderator. At the round table every participant is free to speak up and upload slides at any time, whereas if the meeting is moderated these actions need moderator approval.

You may restrict access to the meeting by setting a password and/or by disabling the following options:

which affects users not subscribed to the community in which the meeting is being booked;

which affects users without SpeakApp account.

Of course, you can set the date and start time of the meeting:

Participants can join the meeting 10 minutes before the booked time, so you do not have to accomodate for the warm-up. On the contrary, if you use slides import from Confluence based on the start time, set the time exactly the same as at the page with slides.

The meeting duration is automatically extended as long as there is any participant, even after the "official" end time. But there is a possibility to manually close the meeting by pressing "End now" button on the meetings list, regardless of number of participating users.

Meeting series

If you want to create a meeting series

or define a recurrence schema by checking the

checkbox. If you use both options the explicitly defined meetings will go first and only after them the schema will kick in. Recurrent meetings are booked one by one, to avoid blocking all the available credit, therefore there is only one upcoming meeting on the meeting list.

You can also book the next meeting in the series by clicking the already closed meeting on the meetings list and answering "yes" to the question.

To cancel the upcoming meeting in the series, press "Cancel" button next to the date and time of the meeting.

SpeakApp can automatically add slides from Indico or Confluence to the meeting if you provide the URL of the associated meeting page or category.

Indico

If your community has not defined default Indico username and password, you should submit it yourself in the booking form. The same rule holds for the HTTP authentication (if required). Please note, that HTTP username and password are not your Indico username and password, but credentials needed to just access the Indico web page, before logging in.

For recurring meetings, you can provide the URL of the whole category. SpeakApp will pick the current meeting automatically based on the current meeting date and time.

  Please put the exact meeting start time, since otherwise, SpeakApp will not choose which slides to fetch.

Add the next session page

If there are breaks in the schedule and the one actual session is split between more than one Indico sessions, you can add all the pages using the "Add the next session page" button.

Confluence

If your community has not defined default Confluence username and password you should submit it yourself in the booking form. We recommend to set up a user with read-only access, just in case.

You may have one large page to cover all recurrence of your meeting like in the following example:

Mar 9th 14:30 JST

• TreeFitter, S. Higuchi
• Skimming report, M. Wilson

Feb 23rd 14:30 - 18:00 JST

• Track-Cluster matching, J. Stypula
• SVD status, K. McConnell

SpeakApp will pick the current meeting based on date and time headers on the page and fetch the linked slides (except for external links).

Alternatively, you can use a separate page for every meeting and provide the URL to the page containing links to those, like below:

• Thursday March 22nd, 2018 at 12:00 am JST
• Wednesday March 7th at 10:00 am JST
• Thursday Feb. 22nd, 2018 at 12:00 am JST
• June 2, 2017 at 14:00 JST
• 2017-03-23 12:00 UTC

SpeakApp will follow the link containing the current meeting date and time. You may use your usual date/time format as long as it contains a time zone abbreviation.

  Please put the exact meeting start time, since otherwise, SpeakApp will not choose which slides to fetch.

Press this button to cancel slides setup.

Instead of the built-in chat, you can embed an external chat service by providing its URL here. There may be some additional options you need to enable in your external chat to allow for embedding it in SpeakApp. Click the "Test it" button to test how the integration works.

You can designate meeting admins to help you with the meeting. They will have the same rights as you. They may modify the meeting, delete it, book the next meeting in the series, and manage the meeting admins (even remove themselves from the list).

Communities

Here you can manage your subscriptions and your communities.

Subscribe

To subscribe to a community you have to give its name. While typing you will see suggestions based on known public communities, but you can ignore them when subscribing to non-public ones. If the community requires an access key, you have to provide it.

User Settings

Here you can change your profile information, password, default time zone, or delete your account, if you want.

Log me out  

Click it to log out.

At a Meeting

Just after entering a meeting room you will be asked to say something to test your microphone. Even if the meeting has already started, other participants will not hear this test. If SpeakApp does not hear your it will display an error message along with some advice. Please follow this advice.

Mute / Unmute

To toggle mute press M or click your name (nickname) or the microphone icon. When the icon is crossed you are muted, when displayed in red your voice is broadcasted. Please mute when not speaking to minimize background noise.

Slides

During a meeting, you can upload and present your slides. You may upload at any time, and it will not interrupt an already ongoing presentation since your slides will be shown only after you unmute yourself and choose your slides from the list. SpeakApp accepts only slides in Portable Document Format (PDF).

Press this button to upload slides. Alternatively you may drop your slides into slide panel to upload at any time (even while other slides are being presented).

To go to the next slide, press this button. You may as well left-click on the slide or use the following keys: , , Enter, Space, Page Down.

To go to the previous slide, press this button. You may as well right-click on the slide or use the following keys: , , Backspace, Page Up.

This will show slides in full screen mode. It is useful for projecting the slides in a conference room. You may as well use your browser shortcut key or F5.

Press this button to rotate the slides 90 degrees clockwise for everyone at the meeting.

By default, slides fit to screen height, but when you use the portrait view, you may want to use this button to fit the slides to screen width.

Press this button to download currently shown slides.

You may also change slides by editing input field with page number and pressing Enter.

Laser pointer

While speaking, you can point at something on the slide using a mouse operated "laser pointer", which can be seen by other participants.

Drawing attention

To emphasize some particular part of the slide, you may draw on it by left-clicking on the slide and moving the pointer around. Right-click to clear the drawings.

 

With emphasis

Chat

You can exchange text messages using chat. URLs are converted to clickable links. By default, your message will be sent to all the participants.

@all 

If you want to message only selected participants, click this button and select the intended recipients. Choose @all to return to the default and include everyone in the conversation.

Click this button to download the chat content. The file will include the meeting name and the timestamp of the download.