eLearning Voice Over: A Comprehensive Guide Everything to know about eLearning voice over.

Present Like a Pro: How to Add Voiceovers on Google Slides and PowerPoint

Imagine teaching an online course to a packed room without having to do it live. How convenient is that?

Instead of lecturing in real-time, you can prepare your slides beforehand, add a voiceover to them, then present them as usual with your discussion already incorporated into them. You can even use artificial intelligence (AI) voiceovers.

AI voiceovers for eLearning can be particularly useful if you don’t have the time or energy to do them yourself. AI can also be practical if you think a different voice will do a better job at making your presentation more effective or interesting. Or perhaps you feel your accent may be too heavy for most of your audience to understand.

Before you proceed any further, prepare your presentation (i.e., your deck) and create your voiceover script. You need to write a script for every slide. Once you have those ready, follow the steps below.

Adding a Voiceover to a Google Slide Presentation

If you are using Google Slides, do the following:

1. Prepare Your Voiceover Audio

You can record the audio yourself using your computer. Taking the script you prepared beforehand, use your computer’s native sound recording app or a professional program like Audacity, Ardour, or Adobe Audition to record your voiceover.

You may also hire a professional and do it in a studio. You may hire a voice talent, rent a studio, record your voiceover using professional equipment and, in the presence of and with guidance from a sound engineer, have the resulting audio recording post-processed.

The latter method will give you great results with lots of investment. However, it is more expensive and time-consuming. Moreover, if you need to make changes to your script later on, there’s no quick and easy remedy. You may have to re-record the erroneous audio, which will cost you more in studio time and service fees.

Alternatively, you can use an AI text-to-speech program. Just plug your well-written (and correctly punctuated) speech into your choice of AI text-to-speech generator, choose your preferred speaking voice (no need to hire a voice talent), and let the program do its magic.

Changing your script is a lot easier too. After making the changes to your text, rerun the AI text-to-speech generator and get an updated voiceover audio file in minutes.

Important Note: Create a separate voiceover audio file for every slide and be precise about file-naming to prevent confusion. For instance, you can name the audio file for slide one as “slide-1.wav.”

By the way, Google Slides will only accept MP3 and WAV files, so make sure to use either of these formats when you save or export your voiceover audio.

2. Upload Your Audio File to Your Google Drive

Once your audio files are prepped and ready, upload them to your Google Drive to make them accessible to your Google Slides presentation.

3. Add Your Voiceover Audio to Your Slides

Open your Google Slides file, then click “Insert>Audio” on the menu to bring up the insert audio interface.

You will see all the audio files you uploaded in the preceding step. Choose the correct audio file and click “Select” to insert that audio into its corresponding slide.

After inserting the voiceover audio file into the correct slide, make the necessary adjustments to its format options. You can set it so the voiceover plays automatically on slide load, and you can adjust the audio volume. You can also choose to hide the audio file icon in the presentation view and force the audio to stop playing upon slide change.

Adding a Voiceover to a PowerPoint Presentation

There are two ways you can add voiceovers to a PowerPoint deck: by inserting pre-recorded audio files into the PowerPoint slides or by recording the voiceovers directly onto the slides.

Insert Audio File

If you choose to prepare the audio file beforehand, follow step one of the preceding section. You can record your voiceovers yourself on your computer or hire a voice talent and record and post-process in a studio.

Using AI is a practical alternative, however. You can simply plug your script into an text to speech software or voice over app to get your professional-sounding voiceover in minutes.

Once your audio files are ready, open your PowerPoint file and insert them into their corresponding slides. Do this by clicking “Insert>Audio>Audio on My PC” from the program’s toolbar menu.

PowerPoint supports audio files with the following extensions:

• .aiff
• .au
• .mid
• ·midi
• .mp3
• .m4a
• .mp4
• .wav,
• .wma

Record Audio File 

Microsoft PowerPoint also lets you record your voiceover directly onto the slide. To do this, open your PowerPoint file, navigate to the correct slide, click “Insert>Audio>Record Audio,” and then record your voiceover.

This method is somewhat limited, however, as it doesn’t leave you a lot of options for audio recording. You may use an interface program to clean up your mic’s sound output, but you won’t have post-processing options. It won’t even allow you to utilize AI voice directly.

Playback Settings

Whichever method you choose — whether you insert pre-recorded audio files or record audio directly onto your slides — you can trim the audio, add fade-in and fade-out transitions, and choose to play it in the background.

If you choose to play the audio in the background, uncheck the play across slides option to ensure the voiceover does not extend to the next slide, and untick the loop until stopped option so your voiceover plays only once.

Use Voiceovers to Enhance Your Presentations

Add voiceovers to your Google Slides and PowerPoint presentations and give your audience a richer experience. Instead of recording your voiceovers yourself, you can use an AI text-to-speech generator to produce your voiceover audio.

Here’s another alternative. You can run your presentation as you would for a live audience but record it without audio using a tool like Open Broadcast Software (OBS). Then, you can add a voiceover to your recorded presentation video directly. You can also use AI voiceovers for videos instead of your own voice or a voice talent for your narration.

Play.ht is a leading AI voice generator and AI text-to-speech platform with hundreds of AI voices you can use to add natural and realistic-sounding voices to your presentations. 

Try Play.ht now!