You are, of course, familiar with PowerPoint and may have delivered presentations by sharing your PowerPoint slides in Teams or Zoom. Perhaps you have already embedded a recorded screen in your PowerPoint presentation or turned your PowerPoint presentation into a video with Panopto? The problem with these features is that the audience has little chance of communicating with you or personalising their user experience. Now this has changed. Microsoft has released the Live Presentations feature that is only available on PowerPoint for the web (not in your desktop app). PowerPoint Live provides a personalized presentation experience to each audience member and offers a range of AI-supported features.
What do I need?
You need a few PowerPoint slides (at least one) and access to PowerPoint for the web. You should save the slides to O365, so they are available during your live presentation.
What do I need to do?
Go to https://portal.office.com or the app launcher (the nine dots on the top left corner when you log on to your Outlook). Select PowerPoint from the menu. Select the presentation or create a new one. Go to the Slide show tab and select Present live. Select who should be able to connect to this presentation (Only people in your organisation / Anyone). Then the screen will show a customized URL or QR code that you can share with the participants.
The AI features make PowerPoint Live special. he audience members can enable live subtitles in their preferred language on their own device. They can move back through the slides at their own pace without impacting the presenter, so if they miss something they can return to the previous slides. The audience can also provide instant feedback to the presenter in the form of live reactions and provide comments and rate the presentation at the end. The presenter will receive the feedback by email.
What should I take into account?
To help your audience make the most of the subtitling feature, speak clearly and calmly. Although the automatic translation is quick (and these days relatively accurate), it will take more time for the AI to translate from Finnish to another language than, for example, from Chinese to English because of the morphological and syntactic features of the Finnish language. You should repeat the key points, because the automatic translation is not fully accurate when working with the Finnish language.
You can set the position of the subtitles in your presentation. Go to Slide show > Always Use Subtitles to find the menu. In the same menu, choose which language you will be speaking while presenting and which language the subtitles should be shown in to help the AI. Please note that Finnish as a spoken language is marked Preview, meaning that it is offered in advance of full support and generally will have somewhat lower accuracy.
Still, PowerPoint Live improves the accessibility of your presentations and helps you reach a broader audience if your deliver a presentation, for example, in English. You can also use PowerPoint Live for teaching purposes, because students at Tampere University and Tampere University of Applied Sciences can also access PowerPoint for the web.
Read more:
Visit Microsoft’s website to read more about PowerPoint Live and find up-to-date user instructions. Watch Microsoft’s video tutorial or Mike Tholfsen’s video tutorial.
If you prefer not to use PowerPoint Live, you can use Stream in O365. Enjoy working with videos!