Day 10 – Improving your presentations
Welcome to day 10 of the 12 Days of AI. Today we will look at Microsoft’s AI tool called Speaker Coach.
What is Speaker Coach?
Speaker Coach is a PowerPoint tool (web version only) that helps you give more effective presentations. Speaker Coach evaluates your pacing, pitch, use of filler words, informal speech, euphemisms, and culturally sensitive terms. It also detects when you’re being overly wordy or are simply reading the text on a slide. After each rehearsal, you get a report that includes statistics and suggestions for improvements.
Explore Microsoft’s privacy policy to learn how they use the information you provide to them.
How do I access Speaker Coach?
Sign in to Microsoft 365 with a personal account (hotmail.com, outlook.com, live.com, msn.com), or a Microsoft 365 work or university account. (Alternatives listed below.)
Open a presentation you have in PowerPoint for the web.
Your task:
Use Speaker Coach and generate a Rehearsal Report. You may want to watch this (8min) videos before beginning: How to Present Better with PowerPoint Presentation Coach
- On the Slide Show tab, select Rehearse with Coach. (If you’ve turned off the Simplified Ribbon, you don’t have a Slide Show tab; instead use the View tab to start Speaker Coach.)
- The presentation opens in a full-screen view, similar to Slide Show.
- Select Get Started when you are ready to begin rehearsing.
- As you speak, Coach gives on-screen guidance about pacing, inclusive language, use of profanity, filler words, and whether you’re reading the slide text.
- When you’re through, exit the full-screen view. Coach opens a Rehearsal Report that summarizes what it observed and offers recommendations.
Alternatives to Speaker Coach:
Join the conversation:
Leave a reply in the comments below or tweet your comment using the hashtag #12DoAI.
- How did you get on with the task – did you find the Rehearsal Report useful? If not, why not?
- Would you use it to practice your own presentations?
- Would you recommend this tool to your students?
Great tool! Didn’t know this existed.
Yesterday we looked at MS speaker coach. I’ve used this before, and was not impressed by its blatant lack of cockney, and my strong Essex accent understanding! But this could be a great resource for those in need of practice, and feedback on their public speaking performance.
The function is now available for a desktop app, and therefore I used the desktop version, rather than the web one. It monitored six aspects of giving an oral presentation, including pace, pitch, inclusivity, repetitive language, originality and fillers. It also provided me with instant feedback (I clicked instant feedback), in addition to a post-rehearsal summary of feedback. I can see the potential of using it by myself and students in preparation of a presentation. However, I am concerned about the following:
– What benchmark is a rehearsal assessed against? What context is the benchmark based on?
While some sort of customization could be added to the function in the future, the current form may disregard features and nature of diverse types of presentations as well as the contexts where they are situated. There is also a danger that following the gold standard that the virtual coach draws on could make presentations monotonous in style.
– What is potential negative impact on some EAL students who are already struggling with language?
It seems to me that the criteria behind the coach shadow native speakers of English, which is often an idealistic but unrealistic model for a presenter whose first language is not English. An international student could speak much slower and clear as they may have the linguistic competence to follow the speed as recommended by the coach. This could put unnecessary pressure on the student when the purpose of a presentation is educational, e.g. a formative assessment in class. The recommendation about ‘originality’ could also set the bar too high for some students. This is, once again, not really necessary in many presentations for educational purposes, and even in some academic conferences.
All in all, this is a great addition to PowerPoint. I will introduce it to my students; however, I will also remind them to take many things into consideration while looking at what the virtual coach says.
Great to know it’s available on desktop now. I find myself needing to use desktop versions since they sometimes support different features than web.
I also agree with language concerns. This could provide unnecessary pressure where a student focuses more on style than substance!
I think it’s an interesting tool but for me I found it distracting when it was giving me live comments so I switched them off. I would rather practise for a minute and get the feedback report and adapt my speech accordingly and do it again. I wonder if it’s possible to set parameters such as telling the software who the audience of the speech will be and the time limit you have to deliver the speech so it adjusts its suggestions according to the context.