The present door is your agent on a big screen. Its face fills the whole screen, with no menus, no sidebar and no page around it. Its name sits in the top corner, a status word such as Ready tells the room what it is doing, and a large caption band along the bottom shows its words so people can read them from across the room. It suits a TV in a waiting room, a kiosk by the door, or a projector at the back of a talk.

Before you start

Your agent must be public. The present door shows only an agent the public can already see; anyone else who opens the address of a private agent gets a page that is not found. If your agent is still private, publish it first. You also need a screen with a current web browser.

Open the present door on the screen

Find your agent's short name. It is the last part of its public page address: for app.netshow.ai/agent/your-agent, the short name is your-agent.
On the screen's browser, open app.netshow.ai/alive/your-agent/present, using your agent's short name.
Switch the browser to full screen.

If your agent has a live face, the face appears. Without one, the screen shows its picture or its initials, so it is never blank.

How the room talks with it

NetShow agents are voice-first and hands-free. The screen opens with a greeting line in the caption band, and it stays quiet until someone taps. Nothing plays out loud and no microphone opens until a person at the screen taps Talk. On that first tap the browser asks for permission to use the microphone, and the button changes to Listening. From then on your agent answers out loud, and its words appear in the caption band.

For someone with no microphone or speaker, there is a typed line on the screen: type a sentence and press Send, and the answer comes back in the caption band.

Pair a TV with your phone

This keeps your phone in charge while a TV in the room shows that it is paired to you.

On the TV's browser, open app.netshow.ai/alive/pair/tv. It shows Bring your agent to this screen and a large six-character code. If the code runs out before you use it, the screen gets a fresh one by itself.
On your phone, sign in and open app.netshow.ai/alive/pair/phone. The page is called Put your agent on a screen.
Type the code from the TV into Code on the screen, then tap Connect this screen.
Your phone shows Connected to a screen. The TV shows Your agent is here and a Paired badge.

The TV lists its limits for everyone in the room to read. Under What this screen can do it lists showing your agent and captions, playing your agent's voice, and taking the remote. Under What stays on your phone it lists listening, knowing who you are, approving anything, and showing anything private. The TV's microphone is never used; your phone does the listening.

Today a paired TV shows that paired sign and its limits, not your agent's face. Showing the face on a paired TV is coming. To put the face on a TV now, open the present door on it, as in the steps above.

Run it on a computer you own

Your agent's edit page has a Run on your device section with two buttons. Put it on a screen opens the screens page, which says what a shop counter or lobby setup needs. Pair this device opens your agent's own device page, which has two steps:

Get the local runtime: tap Download the local runtime. It runs on Windows, macOS or Linux with Node.js 18 or newer. Unzip the folder and follow its install notes.
Pair only a device you trust: tap Pair this device to get a one-time code. The code works once, within five minutes. The connection it makes lasts up to thirty minutes and is tied to this agent, to you as its owner, and to that one runtime. Keep the code private, and tap Clear code from this page when you are done with it. If pairing is not turned on for your site, the button cannot be pressed and the page says so; you can still download the runtime and run the local preview.

Pairing connects that computer to your agent's conversations. Your agent's thinking still happens on NetShow, not on the computer.

Stop showing it

On a present door screen, close the browser tab or turn the screen off. If you make your agent private, its present door stops showing it to everyone else the next time the page loads.
On a paired TV, tap Disconnect the screen on your phone. The TV then shows This screen was disconnected, and your agent is back on your phone.
On a computer running the local runtime, close the local page. Its connection also ends by itself at its fixed time limit. Clearing the code from your device page does not end a connection that has already been made.

Put your agent on a big screen or a TV