PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Speech-Over Studio: 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 this new update to Speech-Over.

Joel: Microphone recording and prerecorded files can now be used in addition to text-to-speech (TTS) voices to add narration to PowerPoint presentations — substantially broadening the product’s applications. Also, you can now add narration clips to slides without attaching them to objects -– good for general topics like introduction and summary.

Speaking about recording, many people ask us: PowerPoint can already add voice recordings to presentations with the Record Narration function, why would I need Speech-Over? The answer is that Record Narration lets you add a voice track to a slide, and that’s fine for static slides. However, when objects on the slides are animated, you want to be able to easily synchronize the voices with the animations to achieve an effective multi-media, movie-like presentation. Speech-Over provides the solution: it delivers a voice track that is perfectly synchronized with the animations. Using a unique technology that adds voice clips directly to animated objects, it synchs voice media effects with the objects’ animation effects. And it’s easy to use: Speech-Over works in PowerPoint design mode and integrates with PowerPoint functions. Users can preview the results immediately in slide show mode. Its voice editing commands change the voice track without re-recording.

In another recent development, designers who want to add voices to PowerPoint-based Flash presentations are finding it easier to add voices to the presentations with Speech-Over before converting them to Flash. The voice track is automatically converted by the PPT2Flash conversion tools.

Speech-Over includes the basic Microsoft TTS voices free, and is now available in the Speech-Over Premium Voice Package, which includes the NeoSpeech premium voices Paul and Kate.

Geetesh: Can you share some case studies of people using Speech-Over?

Joel: Here are three case studies, each showing a different application of Speech-Over.

• On-Line University Courses — Charles Nippert, an engineering professor at Widener University in Pennsylvania, uses Speech-Over to provide online demonstrations for his students quickly and economically. Professor Nippert explained that he posts the PowerPoint presentations on his site without converting them to Flash since his students can download them quickly with their fast connections.
• High School Special Education — Bjarne Lund Henneberg, a high school educator at the Emmerske Efterskole in Tonder, Denmark, pioneered using Speech-Over to add voices (in Danish) to his driving theory course for young people with reading difficulties. The PowerPoint presentation displays the course text on the screen and as the students try to read the text, they hear a voice speaking it aloud, which greatly helps them to understand. Bjarne’s course kills two birds with one stone: the students pass the driving test – and learn how to read in the process.
• Industrial Training — Daniel Moreno, complex maintenance trainer at Tyson Fresh Meats in Holcomb, Kansas uses the software with text-to-speech voices to train employees. The employees view the audio-visual presentations he creates and it’s easy for him to keep presentations up to date by just editing text.

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, Sounds

Intro Animation Contest from PowerPoint Cafe, Korea

The PowerPoint Expert Club is among the largest PowerPoint cafes in Korea. Their new Intro Animation Contest requires participants to create a showcase in PowerPoint with the club/cafe as the topic. The main criteria for the winners will be based on PowerPoint animations — submitted works will be judged through members’ voting. The current, top two submissions are now available on PowerPoint Heaven, the site of Microsoft MVP Shawn Toh.

The winning entry for Intro Animation Contest 1 is by Coolguy7, which can be found here.

Filed Under: PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Animation, Contest, PowerPoint, PowerPoint All Versions, Presentation Samples

An Interview with Johnson Yang

Johnson Yang is General Manager at NewSoft America Inc., a company engaged in creating imaging, multimedia and Internet-related software techniques, as well as wireless projection transmitting hardware.

In this interview, Johnson talks about wireless presentation solutions.

Filed Under: Interviews
Tagged as: Hardware, Interviews, Johnson Yang

Copyright Primer from PACA

PACA, the Picture Archive Council of America has provided an informative PowerPoint presentation on copyrights with guidance on what is fair to use, and what’s not.

This is certainly a recommended download. Find it here.

Filed Under: Pictures and Visuals
Tagged as: Copyrights, Pictures, PowerPoint

Focus on Vcasmo

The online presentation scene is getting more crowded — the newest entrant in Vcasmo. Vcasmo is different from other online presentation sites because it lets you show both your presentation slides and a video clip at the same time.

You need to upload your presentation and video first, resequence the content in a basic timeline editor, and then publish it. For your presentation, you can upload PowerPoint files, Adobe PDFs, and picture file formats.

Publishing can take a while, but Vcasmo can send you an email, or ping you on IM when it’s done!

Filed Under: Companion Programs
Tagged as: Companion, Online Presentations, PowerPoint