Powerpoint has a bad reputation for allowing people to create boring presentations. But did you know that it has live captions with translation built in? Check out the following video to see this in action.

Why captioning of talks is important

Captions are a great help for your audience. Originally for the hard of hearing, it can make it easier for everybody else to follow what you said. These automated captions use machine learning and do need an internet connection.

Turning on live captions in Powerpoint

You can turn on live captioning by selecting the Slide Show menu item in the main menu:

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To turn on live captioning, you select "Always use subtitles" in the secondary menu. When you switch to presentation mode and start talking you will see a "[listening…]" message followed by captions of what you said.

The "Subtitle settings" menu gives you a few more options.

You can select the spoken language and the subtitle one, which microphone to use to get the spoken words and where to display the captions. The options are either below or above the presentation or as an overlay of the presentation.

Showing translated captions in a different language than what you speak

You can select the spoken language and the one of the subtitles and they will get translated live. There are a lot fewer  to choose from in the spoken language menu and the translation quality differs from language to language.

Next time you present, show your words!

It is important to remember that these generated subtitles are not a replacement for professional subtitles and captions you should have when you release the recording, but can make a difference during your presentation for the people in the room.

Google Slides has a similar feature, but doesn't offer translation and subtitles don't have any punctuation.