What is an audience response system?

Audience response system is the older, broader name for the category that live polling now dominates. It once meant physical handsets distributed to a room; today it usually means attendees’ own phones.

In practice at an event

The job is unchanged: ask a room something, aggregate the answers, show the result while it is still relevant. What changed is the hardware. Handsets meant distribution, collection, batteries and a lost-device count. Phones mean none of that and a dependency on connectivity instead.

For most conferences the practical form is whatever the event app already provides, because it avoids asking attendees to install a second thing or hold a second device. A separate polling tool is a second URL, a second login and a second set of instructions from the stage.

What to look for

If you are considering a standalone polling product alongside your event app, weigh the friction honestly. Two tools means two adoption problems, and the second one has no registration desk behind it.

Where handsets still make sense is in regulated or high-security settings where phones are not permitted, and in audiences where phone use during a session is culturally unacceptable. Those cases are real and they are narrow.

How event67 handles it

Polls, Q&A and reactions all live in the same session screen of the app attendees already have, so there is no second tool and no second set of instructions. Results display to the room in real time. There is no handset integration and none is planned; if your setting requires hardware voting devices, that is a specialist product.