Microsoft PowerPoint's Real-time Translation Tool

By CIOReview | Friday, December 15, 2017
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Microsoft PowerPoint’s Real-time Translation Tool

Microsoft’s PowerPoint presentation translator is the latest in real-time AI enabled software that is now available to customers. First showcased at its Build conference in May, the PowerPoint add-on is aimed at everyday users. The program supports speaking in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish while displaying closed captions for over 60 languages. When enabled, it provides automatic real-time translated subtitles or text from the presentation while continuing to retain the original text formatting, including translating text between left-to-right and right-to-left languages.

While the main focus of the program the translation, the service also allows users to caption presentations to aid those who are hard of hearing or deaf. The system works with Microsoft PowerPoint 2013 and 2016 but is designed with Office 365 in mind. The idea behind the designing of the program was to help users overcome language barriers during key presentations. Providing translation capabilities for customers has been an area of focus for Microsoft, with the company having launched a Skype translator for real-time video calls.

Users will be able to customize the speech recognition engine using the vocabulary within the slides and the notes to enable it to adapt to jargon, product names, technical terms or any other things the users may have in mind. The engine even supports multi-lingual casual conversations to help with student integration and also offers transcripts for those who would like to review the presentation content in their own time.

 

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