Microsoft continues to impress with AI. The company has expanded its artificial intelligence work to two of its most popular products, Skype and PowerPoint. And that too, in the most refined fashion possible.
Live captions and subtitles are now for Skype and PowerPoint, and make it easier to understand what people are saying.
The captions use speech-to-text AI capabilities to record what is being said in real-time during a presentation or video call, and also allow users the option to change language settings in case they need subtitles.
Redmond will also roll out these features for PowerPoint in early 2019, late January to be precise.
The company has been using similar software to power its own presentations in recent years, providing captions and translations to audiences. And now, this powerful capability will be available to end users to add as and where needed.
This short video showcases the power available here:
Presenters will be able to customize the appearance of subtitles to match a presentation, while the speech recognition is intelligent enough to adapt for more accurate terminology based on context.
Microsoft previously used an add-in to provide this type of functionality in PowerPoint, but now it is going native. Google also provides similar features in G Suite.
These features will be available across the Windows, macOS and online versions of PowerPoint.
As for Skype, live captions and subtitles are already live on the latest version of the communications client, and work on both one-on-one and group calls. Microsoft has promised to bring translation support for over 20 languages and dialects in the coming weeks.
If you’re ready to try these new additions out, the company has put together a little guide on its support page on how to turn the feature on.
It is available on Windows devices, as well as Android, macOS and iOS.
