Live Closed Captioning in Microsoft PowerPoint
The Microsoft Office suite has been around a long time. Since 1988 to be exact—in computer years, that’s almost forever. Yet Microsoft is still able to add new, innovative features to the suite, and one of the latest is live closed captioning in PowerPoint.
Closed captioning has been around since the early 70s, but for years it was a manually intensive and time-consuming task. Recent improvements in speech recognition have made it possible to add live closed captioning. That’s exactly what Microsoft has now done with PowerPoint. (To be clear, today closed captioning in PowerPoint is only in Office Insider releases of the Office suite, and only on Windows 10 or macOS® Mojave. Hopefully, it will become available in Office 365 customer releases in the near future.)
Figure 1 shows what closed captioning looks like in Office for Windows running in Parallels Desktop® 14 for Mac on a MacBook Pro® running macOS Mojave:
Figure 1_Closed Captioning in PowerPoint for Windows
Video 1 shows live closed captioning running on the same system:
As with speech recognition on the Mac, the spoken utterances are sent to a special server in the cloud for conversion to text. The end of the video shows that my speech can be translated into Japanese text—one of about 30 supported languages.
Are you an Office Insider or a Windows Insider? Parallels Desktop provides a risk-free way to run early releases of operating systems or major applications like Office for Windows. Download the trial version of Parallels Desktop today so you can use the latest features from Microsoft, like live closed captioning in PowerPoint.
