PowerPoint and Presenting Stuff

Speech-Over 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.

In this conversation, Joel discusses the new Speech-Over version 5 release.

Geetesh: Tell us more about the new Speech-Over 5, and how it can help PowerPoint users quickly create narrated slides.

Joel: We at Tuval Software are really excited about Speech-Over 5! It turns any narration script text into audio narration in PowerPoint in just a few seconds. Thanks to text-to-speech software, which works faster than ever. And updating the narration is a dream — just edit the text and you are through. The time savings in adding narration impacts on the development time for the entire presentation: save 50% of the time. Another time-saving feature: narrations are synced with animations automatically and instantaneously, without any timeline editing.

But what I really want to tell people about is that we have improved the text-to-speech voices to the extent that they are now a real alternative to professional voice talent recordings in presentations and videos for learning and training.

Speech-Over tab in the PowerPoint Ribbon

We’ve identified the reason why professional voice talents and motivational speakers are so effective: they introduce short pauses in their speech, called rhetorical pauses, which break up the sentences into phrases, making it easier for the ear to hear and understand the separate ideas contained in the sentence (these “rules of elocution” are well-known to the great motivational speakers).

Speech-Over 5 lets the user add those rhetorical pauses in a text-to-speech voice. Presentation authors add them by inserting vertical bars in the narration text where the pauses are desired, following the simple rules of elocution provided. The results are amazing to hear (listen to the video on our site).

In addition, the user can now control the length of pauses after punctuation marks: comma, em-dash, period, and paragraph — which makes the voices even more realistic.

The Speech-Over 5 release includes two products: our flagship product Speech-Over Professional for commercial use, and the new low-cost product Speech-Over Cool for general use. Speech-Over Cool uses the Microsoft Speech Platform text-to-speech voices (which are pretty cool).

Geetesh: We found that PowerPoint’s video output incorporates all the narrations that Speech-Over 5 creates – this makes it super easy to create YouTube movies and advertorials! Can you share your thoughts and any tips on making this process even better?

Joel: Yes, that is correct. Beginning with PowerPoint 2010 you could produce WMV video files with audio and with PowerPoint 2013 you can produce much smaller MP4 videos. Because all visual and media effects produced by Speech-Over are standard PowerPoint effects, they are handled perfectly in PowerPoint video output.

“Super easy” says it all — I will just add that changing and updating the video’s narration is just as fast — just edit the narration text and produce the video again.

Thanks, Geetesh, for giving us the opportunity to tell people about Speech-Over 5.

See Also: Speech-Over Professional: Conversation with Joel Harband

The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors 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

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Sharing Custom Dictionaries

Each logged-in user has a default custom dictionary called RoamingCustom.dic — in addition you can create and use many more custom dictionaries. Over time, your custom dictionaries may become a very useful resource, especially since any custom dictionary loaded is used by all the Office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Let us assume that you have added several words to the custom dictionaries over the last 4 or 5 years, and now you need to move to a new computer. Or probably you have a colleague who is going to help you with some documentation, and you obviously want him or her to use your custom dictionary. To share the actual dictionary files (.dic), you first need to find out where they are stored on your computer.

Learn how to share custom dictionaries in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows

Filed Under: PowerPoint 2013
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Text, Tutorials

Clichés: Phone Operator Pictures in PowerPoint

We already looked at how you can overcome clichéd pictures, and we thereafter specifically looked at examples of handshake and globe pictures. Yes, those two visual concepts may be the most clichéd ones, but there’s yet another clichéd picture scenario – and that’s the picture of a phone operator! The phone operator is more often female than male. She has a big smile and looks at you while she is also holding a phone in one hand. Such pictures are often used anywhere people want to represent “communication”.

Learn why another picture of a phone operator will get you to clichéd hell, and what you can do about it.

Filed Under: Clip Media
Tagged as: Clichés, Design, Graphics, Opinion, Pictures, Presentation Skills, Visuals

PowerPoint and Presenting News: May 12, 2015

We begin with a new Concept Slides collection called Polygon Center Circles — you can use these Polygon Center Circles in any slide that needs to show 3, 4, 5, or 6 segments. We then bring you a column by Jerry Weissman who discusses Hillary Clinton’s new logo. Jeremey Donovan then discusses his new book, Strategic Storytelling: How to Create Persuasive Business Presentations in an exclusive interview. PowerPoint 2013 users can learn about Picture Layouts, dictionaries, and AutoCorrect proofing options. PowerPoint 2010 users can explore adding new SmartArt graphics. Finally, don’t miss the new discussions and templates of this week!

Read Indezine’s PowerPoint and Presenting News.

Filed Under: Ezine
Tagged as: Ezine, Indezine, News, PowerPoint

Learn PowerPoint 2013 for Windows: Disable, Enable, and Set the Default Custom Dictionary

Any custom dictionary that you create within PowerPoint or any other Microsoft Office program is used by all the Office applications installed on your computer. Also, if any changes are made to the list of words within a custom dictionary, it will be reflected within the spell check tools of all Office applications. Each logged-in user has a default custom dictionary called RoamingCUSTOM.dic, and this is stored in a separate folder for each local user.

Learn how to disable, enable, and set the default custom dictionary in PowerPoint 2013 for Windows.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tagged as: PowerPoint 2013, Text, Tutorials