Live demos
An auto typer for demos and presentations
Typing in front of an audience is the one part of a demo you cannot rehearse into safety. Typist enters text you prepared earlier into the field on screen, at a speed you set, and stops the moment you tell it to.
The problem is not typing speed
Anyone who has run a live demo knows the shape of it. You are talking, watching the room, keeping an eye on the clock, and also trying to type a sentence into a search box without transposing two letters. Something gives, and it is usually the typing — so you are backspacing on a projector while forty people watch the cursor.
The fix is not to type faster. It is to separate writing the text from performing it. Write the query, the code sample, or the sentence you want on screen beforehand and paste it into the Typist panel. When you reach that point in the talk, click the field and press Start. The text goes in at the words-per-minute you chose while your attention stays on the room.
Pause and resume is the feature that matters here
Everything else on this page is convenience. Pause is the reason a paced typer works on stage at all.
A live demo is not a recording. Someone asks a question mid-sentence. The projector lags. The room has not caught up with the previous point. You press pause, the run holds exactly where it is, and you talk for as long as you need. Press it again and the text carries on from the same character, not from the start. A progress indicator shows how far through the run you are, so you can see at a glance whether you have two words left or two hundred.
Stop is the other half of it. If the moment has passed, stop ends the run where it stands and leaves the field as it is — nothing is queued up waiting to fire at you later.
So you can build a demo beat around the typing rather than around the gaps in it: start the text, let a sentence land, pause, explain what the audience is looking at, resume.
Pick a speed for the room, not for yourself
Typist runs from 20 to 400 words per minute, with a default of 60 and presets at 40, 60, 100, 150, 250 and 400. On stage, slower is usually right. If the audience is meant to read the text as it appears, 40 to 60 wpm gives them time; at 250 the sentence is finished before anyone has focused on it.
Two pacing modes are available. The varied pace adds short pauses at punctuation, which suits prose a room is reading along with. The fast steady mode runs roughly eight times quicker with no pauses, which is what you want for a block nobody needs to read word by word — a long configuration file, say. More on choosing between them under typing speed control.
The other reason to set a speed deliberately is timing. A demo that has to fit a slot benefits from a segment whose duration you know in advance: 300 words at 60 wpm is about five minutes.
Setting up before you go on
- Save the blocks you will use. A snippet is a titled block of text kept on your account and synced to your other signed-in devices, so the deck you built on your laptop is there on the machine wired to the projector. Free accounts keep three; Pro keeps as many as you like. See saved snippets.
- Rehearse at the speed you will use. Run each block once at its real wpm so you know how long it takes and where you want to pause.
- Click the field, then press Start. Typist types into the one field you have focused. It does not click, navigate, or switch tabs for you, so the pointer stays where you put it.
Free plan: 300 words a day, reset at 00:00 UTC. A Google sign-in is required before typing.
What it works with
Typist types into editable browser fields: text boxes, text areas, rich-text editors, and Google Docs documents, which have dedicated support in the extension — see auto type in Google Docs. If what you clicked is not an editable field, the run does not start and the panel asks you to click into a text field first. Worth knowing before you are on stage rather than during.
- Does the audience see the panel?
- The Typist side panel is part of your Chrome window. If you are sharing a full screen it is visible; if you are sharing a single tab, it is not. Check which one your conference software is doing before the session.
- What happens if I stop a run early?
- The text already entered stays in the field and nothing further is typed. On the free plan, the words the run set aside when you pressed Start still count against that day's allowance, so a rehearsal costs the same as a performance — see pricing.
- Can I run several fields in one go?
- No. One run enters text into one focused field. For a sequence, run the first block, click the next field, and start again.
Start with the overview on the auto typer for Chrome page if you are new to the product.