If you have Office 365 (the subscription version that is always updated), there’s a new feature coming out that is truly extraordinary! If you’re in the Office Insider program, you may have it already. Otherwise, you’ll get it when it’s rolled out to everyone with Office 365.
As you talk, PowerPoint will display what you are saying on your slides — or translate it into any of more than 60 languages. 60!
Right now, it understands 6 spoken languages:
- Chinese (PRC)
- English (Canada, United Kingdom, United States)
- French (France)
- German (Germany)
- Italian (Italy)
- Spanish (Spain)
They’re working on several more spoken languages.
Why is this important?
This feature is ideal when you’re speaking to people who might be:
- Deaf or hard of hearing
- Not fluent in the language you’re speaking
The fact that PowerPoint can do this as you speak is amazing.
Setting up subtitles and translation
To set this up, on the Slide Show tab, check Always Use Subtitles. (You can always turn this off.) But you can also turn the feature on or off on the fly, during a presentation:
From Slide Show view: Hover your cursor over the lower-left corner of the slide to display the icon menu and click the Subtitles icon or right-click and choose Start Subtitles. (These are toggles so you do the same thing to stop subtitles.)
From Presenter view: Click the Toggle Subtitles button beneath the main slide.
You can also set the position, size, color, and more of the subtitles:
- From the Slide Show tab, choose Subtitle Settings
- From Slide Show view, right-click and choose Subtitle Settings
The Subtitle Settings is also where you can choose from over 60 languages. You’ll see the Star Trek twist in the video below.
You’ll get the best results with a good microphone and, if you might be moving around, a headset. The feature also requires an Internet connection.
You can read more about this feature here.
Watch the feature in action
I recently did a session on Presenter View in my Power Pointers Quarter Hour training program and included a demo of this feature, which you can see below. In the video (under 6 minutes), I try out the translation into French and Klingon–yup, you can do that. (If you don’t know, Klingon is a language that was created for the TV show, Star Trek.)
Will you use this feature? If so, how? Leave a comment! And please share this with other presentations who might need to know about subtitles and captions, using the Share buttons below.
OK, Ellen! Yes, that is an exciting feature: The speakers’ words, in real time, as Subtitles (in a choice of display languages)! Fantastic, and will this version of PPT also provide the option to save that live transcription as a PDF or Text document?
Deb, I haven’t seen or read of anything like that, but I’ll ask about it.
Good, Ellen. Thank you. I look forward to getting that update! 🙂
Jan here,I have Office 2018 Pro Plus – Not office 365.Will this work in it? I don’t want a subscription, but this does get updates.
I get the translate part (Klingon makes sense, many programmers are “Trekkies”, and what the heck, you might as well get paid to have a little fun at work. It is just another form of “Easter Egg”. And it will probably be cut out of the final production version, since there are so few Klingon speakers. There are some, have you seen “The Big Bang Theory”, all of the guys in the cast speak it ). The real-time on-screen transcription is nice, but it would be much nicer if there was an option to save the text. The definition of… Read more »
Oops forgot to say …
Could you add the link to the MS Support page you used, I could not find it.
Looking for the MS Support web page you referenced I found an MS addin that does essentially the same thing:
https://translator.microsoft.com/help/presentation-translator/
Seems it is like the “experimental” “Search Tool” the MS Lab created for Officd 2010 which was degraded and implemented as the “Tell me what … ” feature in 2016.
MS Support page for the addin:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/using-microsoft-translator-in-a-presentation-2582d976-97ea-4bf3-af1b-3647d925240a
Here is the MS Blog propaganda announcement of the feature:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/12/03/present-more-inclusively-with-live-captions-and-subtitles-in-powerpoint/
I think this is marvelous, but currently only available to PCs. Do you know when Macs will enjoy this feature as well?
I don’t know when, but if you have the subscription version, it will come out in the next few months.
Only the subscription versions get feature updates. Other versions only get bug fixes, as far as I know.
I’ve found out that there’s a similar feature at https://translator.microsoft.com/help/presentation-translator/ that you can download and this DOES offer a way to get a text file of the translation. On that page, it says, “At the end of the presentation, the presenter can decide to save a transcript of the presentation (including audience participation) in a text file.”
Ellen: Thanks for pointing that out. Since I don’t actually use that tool, I didn’t read all the way through it. Too bad they buried that specific feature so far down in the article.
It appears that there’s a similar feature that does offer a text file. See https://translator.microsoft.com/help/presentation-translator/. It’s an add-in and as far as I can tell, anyone can download and install it.
Delightful, Ellen / Ron!
Now if it could just be tweaked to *affordably* work with ANY existing audio/video file. What a study / reference tool that would be! (Sadly, IP Thieves would quickly ruin that party…)
Hi Ellen,
This is wonderful!
Can this be recorded at the same time? If so, where? Maybe I missed it.
Thanks!
Margaret
This is usually done with a live audience. At any rate, recording would have to be a separate process, either using a camcorder or phone to record the presenter and the slides or, if online, using some type of webinar or meeting software, such as Zoom.