Engage Your Audience With An Interactive Word Cloud Generator

Amaze the audience in front of you. Ask a question with a free live and interactive word cloud generator (also referred to as a word collage maker or word bubble generator) and see the responses of your audience live on screen.

See examples of great live word cloud questions, and find how you can use an interactive word cloud generator to create a live word cloud today.

Make a Live Word Cloud With Ahaslides now Watch the Video

Alternative Text

What is a Live Word Cloud?

A word cloud is a great way to visualise data. A live word cloud is a tool you can use with an audience to show the most popular opinions in the room represented as a word cloud!

It’s really just a visual web of 1 or 2-word responses to a question. The more popular a particular response is, the bigger it appears in the word cloud generator.

An Example of a Live Word Cloud:

a live word cloud asking participants which city they are tuning in from

Here, we asked 23 participants in a virtual meeting the question ‘Which city are you tuning in from?‘ 

We’ve got 23 one-word responses, with the most popular response being  ‘Birmingham’, so it is the biggest word and in the centre.

The next most popular responses are smaller. ‘Aberdeen’, ‘Leeds’, ‘Edinburgh’, ‘Liverpool’ and ‘London’ appear at the same size because all five responses were submitted the same number of times.

Check out 101 more word cloud examples!

9 Questions to Ask Using A Live Word Cloud Generator

Live word cloud generators are one of the most versatile bits of kit in the modern presenter’s toolbox. They can be used with any audience, at the start, middle or end of a session for a range of goals.

What questions can you ask your audience with a live word cloud?

Ice Breakers

As a quick, simple and relatable way to start a team meeting or project kickoff meeting, a live word cloud can be a brilliant tool. It has the ability to break the ice and bring people together via their shared opinions or circumstances.

1. Where are you from?

Ask your participants from where they’re joining from and discuss the most popular answers.

Great for: Online workshops or training sessions.

2. How are you feeling?

Checking to make sure everyone is coping okay, and seeing the general feeling of the room, is a great use for a live interactive word cloud.

Great for: Remote team meetings or classes.

3. Thoughts on the game?

Conversational topics like this can help people relax into a new session and lighten the mood ahead of the real meat of the meeting.

Great for: Team meetings, training sessions or classes.

Voting

While a multiple-choice poll can reveal the most popular result from a setlist, voting via a data cloud is a good way to elicit open responses with no limits. The most popular answer will appear clearly as the largest response.

A live word cloud showing votes for areas of mathematics.

4. What topic should we go over?

Ask your students or team members to choose which topic they’d like to revisit, or which matter they think is the most urgent.

Giving people the freedom to identify their own weak points can help build important self-analytical skills.

Great for: Team meetings, training or classes.

A live word cloud showing votes for the names of team members who have performed well.

5. Who nailed their work this week?

This one is part icebreaker, part voting word cloud.

Ask your team who they think has performed well in the past week, then see the most popular members of the team loom large.

Great for: Team building activities, team meetings and classes.

A live word cloud showing that it's coming home,

6. Who’s winning the World Cup?

For a bit of preamble in a pub quiz, or just some light-hearted speculation before a team meeting or lesson kicks off, this one is good for jumping on that pre-tournament expectation before England brings it home.

Great for: Quizzes, social events or team meetings.

Quick Tests

Want to check understanding of a topic in a clear and concise way? A live wordle can show you how popular a question’s correct answer is compared to all the others submitted by students or trainees.

A live word cloud showing the names of philosophers.

7. One right answer

Ask a question with only one right answer.

Its size compared to all the other answers will let you know the general level of understanding in the class or workshop.

Its size compared to all the other answers will let you know the general level of understanding in the class or workshop.

Great for: Quizzes, training sessions or classes.

A live word cloud showing French words that end in 'ette'.

8. Multiple right answers

Ask a question with multiple right answers.

This way, you can see the level of comprehension of all students or trainees, while congratulating the smaller, more obscure answers.

Ask a question with multiple right answers.

Great for: Quizzes, training sessions or classes.

A live word cloud showing countries beginning with 'B'.

9. Pointless (Game)

Pointless is a British TV show where the more obscure your answer is, the better you do.

Ask a question and award points to the smallest answer on the board. (Learn how to play it here!)

Pointless is a British TV show where the more obscure your answer is, the better you do.

Great for: Quizzes, training sessions or classes.

Other Ways to Use Word Clouds

Word clouds (also known as word bubbles, tag clouds, data clouds, wordles, word collage makers, and word collages)  can display all sorts of data, and they don’t have to be in an interactive format. Here are some additional ideas to fire your imagination.

An word cloud showing the frequency of words in reviews for movies in the Star Wars franchise.

Frequency

A frequency word cloud is like the live word cloud examples above, with popular results appearing the largest. The difference here is that all data is inputted by the creator of the word cloud, rather than a live audience.

A tag cloud showing the relative populations of each American state.

Significance

Aside from showing the popularity of certain words, word clouds can also represent significance in other fields, like size, power, or even sugar content in breakfast cereals.

A well-known version of this is the population word cloud, where place names with a higher population appear larger.

A word cloud showing both positive an negative sentiment.

Positive vs Negative Sentiment

These types of clouds use AI to isolate entries depending on whether they have positive and negative sentiments. Words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘awesome’ will appear in the positive cloud, while words like ‘awful’ and ‘bitter’ will appear in the negative one.

Want to make a live word cloud for your classroom or team meeting?

Get any of the above examples as templates. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!

Make Your Own Live Word Cloud or Word College

There is no shortage of tools out there for making a great looking live word cloud. You’ll find free generators all over the web, but an interactive word college generator where your audience input the words themselves? That’s a bit rarer.

Comparison of Interactive Word Cloud Generators Online

Below we’ve compared five of the most popular live word cloud generators and word collage makers around. These tools are also known as word bubble generators and word collage makers.

See our comparison of online word cloud generators or click here to make a live word cloud right now!

AhaSlides Mentimeter Slido Poll Everywhere Kahoot!
Free? ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ❌
Limit per Event None 2 5 None None (with paid account)
Settings Multiple submissions,
Profanity filter,
Hide submissions,
Stop submissions,
Time limit.		 Multiple submissions,
Stop submissions,
Hide submissions.		 Multiple submissions, Profanity filter, Character limit. Multiple submissions,
Change answer.		 Time limit.
Customisable Background? ✅ Paid only ❌ Image and font only for free. ❌
Customisable Join Code? ✅ ❌ ✅ ❌ ❌
Aesthetics 4/5 4/5 2/5 4/5 3/5

Use The Free AhaSlides Live Word Cloud Generator

Here’s how you can make a word collage and set up your live interactive word cloud generator for 100% free.

Alternative Text
  1. 1
    Create an AhaSlides account

    Click here to make an AhaSlides account for free. Create a presentation with your first interactive word cloud!

  2. 2
    Create a word cloud

    Click 'new presentation' and select 'Word Cloud'.

  3. 3
    Set up your live word cloud

    Write your word cloud question. Customise with any of the 6 settings on the slide.

  4. 4
    Style your live word cloud

    In the 'background' tab, change the text colour, base colour, background image and overlay.

  5. 5
    Invite participants to join

    Share your presentation's unique QR or join code with your audience. They use their phones to join your live word cloud.

  6. 6
    Watch the responses roll in!

    Participants send their entries into your live word cloud, which are updated in real-time on the screen.

Bonus 💡 Try out a word cloud template without signing up! Click here to give AhaSlides’ live word cloud generator a test run, with an audience of up to 7 participants before signing up for a free account.

Live Word Cloud FAQ

Got questions about AhaSlides' live word cloud? The FAQ below answers the most common queries. Click the blue button in the bottom-right corner to live chat with one of our team!

Actually, on AhaSlides, there are 2 ways that you can control the kinds of responses you get from your audience. Profanity filter - Applying the 'profanity filter' as a setting on the word cloud means that you can block English-language swear words from being inputted by your audience. The filter will replace the blocked words with asterisks (*) - you can read more about the profanity filter here - If there are audience responses that you do not want to show, you can manually delete them after they're submitted. Simply hover over the word that you want to delete and click it.
You can! If you check the table above, you can see that AhaSlides is the only live word cloud generator that lets you customise the styling of your background. Even on the free plan, you can change the font, text colour, background colour, background image and background visibility. You subscribe to a paid plan, you can even add audio to your cloud that plays while your audience is responding.
Absolutely! On AhaSlides you'll find an option named 'limit time to answer' in the settings of your live word cloud slide. Just check the box and write down the time limit you want to set (between 5 seconds and 20 minutes).
Once you're done with a word collage on AhaSlides, you can re-use the same slide at a later event without the old audience responses. To do this, simply click the 'results' tab in the top toolbar and click the button labelled 'clear data'. This will erase all audience responses, but leave all of your content untouched. You can read more about erasing audience responses here.
They certainly can. Audience-paced word clouds can be a super insightful tool for surveys, and you can set one up easily on AhaSlides. Simply click the 'settings' tab, then 'who takes the lead' and select 'audience'. This way, your audience can join your presentation and progress at their own pace, without you needing to be there.
On AhaSlides' free plan, a maximum of 7 live participants can enter words into your word cloud. Bear in mind that if you run an 'audience-paced' word cloud, you can have more than this, as this limit only applies to live participants.u003cbru003eu003cbru003eIf you need to host a tag cloud for more than 7 live participants, please check out our pricing plans.
Unfortunately, no. While you can install a PowerPoint plug-in to create word clouds from the text in your presentation, there's no option to create a live word cloud and invite your audience to submit the responses themselves. However, we have a full guide on how to make a PowerPoint word cloud for free, using AhaSlides.

Word Cloud Pros and Cons

Here we’ve laid out some of the common pros and cons of using a live word cloud.

Pros ✅ Cons ❌
Their simplicity makes them super easy to understand, especially within a Word Cloud PowerPoint in education. Hard to view every word, especially smaller ones.
Words make a stronger emotional impact than other visualised data. Too much colour and action can be an attack on the senses.
They’ve visually vibrant and appealing. Some factors can influence how viewers perceive the importance of words.
Their anonymity is great for encouraging participation. Small variations in a word are presented as separate results.
Great for understanding how much all your students have taken in, and areas they need to improve on.
Allows other participants to see how the rest of the group feels about an issue or topic.
They can be a fun classroom task, a change in activity.

Other Features

Find out more about using AhaSlides and the different features we offer, suitable for use in your classroom, with your business, or with friends and family such as the wheel spinner. Or, create your own quiz to drive engagement, available to do live anywhere and host for free.

If you have any questions regarding our live interactive world cloud generator or our other features, get in touch with AhaSlides today.

Alternative Text


Start in seconds.

Get any of the above examples as templates. Sign up for free and take what you want from the template library!


🚀 To the clouds ☁️

I love that students can answer anonymously on AhaSlides, so we do silly poll questions and serious questions. It was great for Zoom learning and also in person!

Alternative Text
Rachel R.
Dean of Social Studies

AhaSlides has helped me a lot in my presentations and with my team. The biggest thing is that I've been happy with the interaction between me and my audience

Alternative Text
Elmer S.
Process Manager

I liked that AhaSlides was easy to use and the options for questions was great. I was able to use it for a virtual retreat and it worked wonders. I loved that I was able to edit my background.

Alternative Text
Karol C.
Admin Assistant
Create your word cloud

Got your head in the clouds? We like that.

Create your cloud