A talking sign is a QR code you put on a real thing: a shelf in your shop, a table, a window or a house for sale. Anyone who scans it meets your agent on their own phone, and the agent starts by talking about that exact thing.
Make your sign
-
See one working first. Open the Talking signs page. Under Try the demo sign there is a code; scan it with your phone camera and NetShow's own agent opens on your phone. That is what your visitors get, about your thing instead of ours. Nobody installs anything: a scan opens a web page.
-
Open your agent's sign block. Press Make one near the end of the Talking signs page. If you are signed out, it takes you to sign up first; once you are signed in, press it again. It opens the deploy page of your newest agent at its Talking signs block, or agent creation if you have no agent yet. Each of your agents has its own block on its own deploy page. The agent must be public for a sign to work; until it is, the block tells you a sign opens the normal page, so publish it first.
-
Write the note about the real thing. In Label, write the name of the thing or its address, in 60 characters or fewer. In Note for the agent, write what it is, what matters about it and what people usually ask, in 280 characters or fewer. Press Add sign. Describe the thing in plain words: the form turns away a note that gives the agent orders, and one with brackets or other markup. The note is for your agent only; visitors never see it. One agent can carry up to 20 signs.
-
Get its code and print it. Each sign you add appears in the block with its own QR code. Download QR to print saves that code as an SVG image you can put on a card, a label, a window sticker or a sign; print it large enough to scan from where people stand. Open what a scan opens shows you, on your own screen, the page a visitor's phone opens. If your sign also shows a Print kit button, it opens print-ready pages with the code already laid out for a yard sign, a poster, a table tent or a sheet of stickers. If your Talking signs page shows a What you print section, it has a sample of each of those formats, marked as a sample, to look at first.
-
Know what a visitor's phone does on a scan. The scan opens your agent's public page on the visitor's own phone. Your label shows under the agent's name, and the agent speaks first: its opening line starts with "You’re looking at" and your label, then carries on with its usual greeting. When the visitor asks a question, your note reaches the agent with that first question as facts about the thing, so the answer is about what is in front of them. A talking sign never hides that the visitor is talking to an AI agent; the Talking signs page promises this under What it never does.
-
Change or retire the sign. Open Edit this sign, change the Label or the Note for the agent, and press Save sign. The code stays the same, so copies you already printed keep working and now talk about the new note. To retire a sign, open Remove this sign and press Remove sign. A printed copy of that code then opens your agent's normal page, with no label and no note. Adding the same sign again makes a new code, so print the new one.
What this does not do
It does not print, mail or put up signs for you; you download the code and print it yourself. It does not show your note to visitors, and it does not let the note give your agent instructions. It does not work for a private agent: until the agent is public, a scan opens its normal page. It does not bring a removed sign back on its old code. It does not change the agent itself: its face, voice and knowledge stay as you set them elsewhere, and the sign only tells it what the visitor is looking at.