PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

The Christina Deatherage Interview

Christina Deatherage serves as Vice President of Sales and Marketing for ShowLogicTM for Catevo.

Prior to joining The Catevo Group, she worked for IBM/Lenovo where she held various marketing, sales and strategy positions.

In this interview, she discusses Catevo’s new ShowLogic presentation platform.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, PowerPoint

Google Docs Plays with Offline Access

Google Docs is now providing offline access to editing files on an experimental basis. As of now, this only works with Docs, rather than Spreadsheets and Presentations, but it is definitely a start in a direction that may have far-reaching results in the way we all use computing.

ChannelWeb provides opinions from many users about this new feature that works on Google Gears, an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality.

Even with Docs, this option has not been made available to all Google accounts, so if you don’t see this functionality yet, you might have to wait a little while longer. I’m waiting to see how Google implements this technology into the Presentations component of Google Docs. And while many sites and bloggers seem to indicate that this might be a big blow to Microsoft Office, I think there’s so much more to wait and watch before making a blanket statement of that magnitude.

Filed Under: Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Google, Google Slides, Microsoft Office

Announcing Medicine PowerPoint

Users in the field of medicine are among the largest users of PowerPoint as a medium of information, instruction, and distribution. These users however tend to use PowerPoint in a very different manner than conventional PowerPoint users. They also need a different set of resources that is geared towards their profession. After years of running Indezine, one of the largest PowerPoint sites, we realized that there really isn’t a PowerPoint resource available that has been created exclusively for end users in the medicine sector. And thus, MedicinePPT was born.

If you work with PowerPoint in the medicine sector, please do share this resource with your colleagues, and do send us your feedback so that we can make this site better.

Filed Under: Templates
Tagged as: Medicine, PowerPoint, Templates

Speech-Over Studio 2.5: Conversation with Joel Harband

Joel Harband heads Tuval Software Industries, based in Israel. Their best-known product is Speech-Over Studio, a PowerPoint add-in that enables PowerPoint slides to incorporate narrations using automated voices.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the new features and improvements in Speech-Over 2.5.

Joel: Sure. First, I’d like to remind readers of Speech-Over’s mission: To use narration and animation in PowerPoint to achieve the impact of a live presentation. This boosts the effectivity of PowerPoint-based e-learning, training, and web presentations in an easy and economical way.

Speech-Over lets users build effective narrations from individual narration clips, combining general orientation topics, like introduction and summary, with specific content topics linked to screen objects. PowerPoint animations synchronized with the narration clips are added to illustrate and clarify the narration.

Speech-Over uses articulate text-to-speech (TTS) voices to add and maintain professional narration easily.

The new features in Speech-Over 2.5 are designed to raise efficiency when the software is used by teams of authors. The features include the ability to refresh all narration clips in the presentation after changes in preferences, including the slide notes generated in the notes pane, and an improved voice preview function in the narration clip editor that allows skipping sentences during the preview and stopping it in the middle.

Geetesh: Can you tell us more about the TTS voices, what they are, and how one can get more of them?

Joel: Text-to-speech (TTS) is the automated synthesis of speech from text. The heart of the system is the text-to-speech engine, a sophisticated piece of software that parses the text input, analyzes its grammar, sentence structure, punctuation, and capitalization, and activates voice simulations to produce a vocal rendering of the text.

The data for individual voices are provided in separate files called “voices”. The TTS engine can work with any of the voices interchangeably.

Advances in TTS technology have replaced the old robotic computer voices with new, amazingly realistic ones.

Synthesized from real voices, these remarkable TTS voices can read books aloud beautifully without a mistake, guided only by grammar, sentence structure, and punctuation. People use them to learn and review while driving.

The exciting news is that these articulate TTS voices have been harnessed by Speech-Over to empower users to add professional narration in presentations easily.

Speech-Over, which has an embedded text-to-speech engine, accepts user narration text and launches TTS voices from within PowerPoint to record professional narrations from the text alone.

Change the narration text as often as you need and these tireless voices record new versions quickly and faithfully without complaint.

TTS voices are separate computer applications which, once installed, are recognized by Speech-Over. They are available in male and female genders, in all major languages, and in various regional dialects.

Basic quality Microsoft voices Mike and Mary are included free. For much better results, premium TTS voices are available from voice vendors such as AT&T and NeoSpeech at affordable prices. Speech-Over uses SAPI 5 standard TTS voices.

The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Add-in, Interviews, Joel Harband, PowerPoint, Speech-Over

Online Presentations with Flypaper

Flypaper is a cool, new presentation creation program that lets you create Flash presentations that you can instantly upload to sites like YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. In its present beta incarnation, it has some rough edges and any comparison with PowerPoint would probably be like comparing apples and oranges since Flypaper seems to provide a very different concept altogether.

Flypaper is a free application that runs on Windows XP and Windows Vista only (no Mac yet) — it’s a large download at 89 mb whereabouts, but it’s fun to play with and may evolve into something very useful. The screenshot above shows the interface — click on the screenshot to see a larger preview.

Flypaper does get into new terminology though: slide layouts/designs are called ‘models’!

Filed Under: Online Presentations
Tagged as: Flypaper, Online Presentations, YouTube