Presentation Translator for PowerPoint

The technologies behind Presentation Translator

Presentation Translator for PowerPoint is powered by the Microsoft Translator live feature which lets you have translated chats by starting or joining a conversation from the Translator app. Up to 100 people can chat at once using the Translator app or directly from their browser at http://translate.it.

The Microsoft Translator live feature is built using Microsoft Translator core speech translation technology, the Microsoft Translator API, an Azure Cognitive Service.

Presentation Translator integrates the speech recognition customization capabilities of Custom Speech Service (CSS) from Azure’s Cognitive Services to adapt speech recognition to the vocabulary used in the presentation.

What does custom speech recognition do?

• Improves the accuracy of your subtitles by learning from the content in your slides and slide notes. In some cases, you will see up to 30% improvement in accuracy.
• Customizes speech recognition for industry-specific vocabulary, technical terms, acronyms, and product or place names. Customization will reduce these errors in your subtitles, as long as the words are present in your slide or slide notes.

How to set up custom speech in your presentation

• The first time you customize speech recognition for your presentation, it can take up to 5 minutes for Presentation Translator to finish learning.
• After the first time, the subtitles will start instantaneously unless you update the content of your slides.
• Tip: start the custom speech recognition during a practice run so that you don’t experience delays when you present to your audience.

How does the custom speech recognition feature work?

The custom speech recognition feature works by training unique language models with the content of your slides. The language models behind Microsoft’s speech recognition engine have been optimized for common usage scenarios.

The language model is a probability distribution over sequences of words and helps the system decide among sequences of words that sound similar, based on the likelihood of the word sequences themselves. For example, “recognize speech” and “wreck a nice beach” sound alike but the first sentence is far more likely to occur, and therefore will be assigned a higher score by the language model.

If your presentation uses particular vocabulary items, such as product names or jargon that rarely occur in typical speech, it is likely that you can obtain improved performance by customizing the language model.

For example, if your presentation is about automotive, it might contain terms like “powertrain” or “catalytic converter” or “limited slip differential.” Customizing the language model will enable the system to learn this.

When you use the Customize speech recognition feature in Presentation Translator, your presentation content – including notes from the slides – is securely transmitted to the Microsoft Translator transcription service to create an adapted language model based on this data. Data used for customization is not de-identified and is retained in full, along with the adapted model, by the service for thirty (30) days from last use to support your future presentations and use of the language modeling.

Tips for using Presentation Translator

Audio/visual set-up

Before you get started, you’ll need:

• A working microphone: We suggest using a Bluetooth headset so you can move around without restrictions. Check out our list of recommended headsets
• PowerPoint for Windows: PC only. Make sure you do not have any Office applications open while Presentation Translator installs. Once installed, the add-in will update automatically each time a new version is published.
• Permissions: If you are an educator and use a school login for PowerPoint, you may need to contact your administrator to install the add-in on your device(s).
• Internet connection: A hard-wired connection is ideal, but a reliable WiFi connection works well also.If you’re using the add-in for an event, the lecturer should use a wired connection if possible, or dedicated WiFi. Although it will work on WiFi or 4G, if either is weak, or there’s a lot of competition for bandwidth, it can adversely affect performance. Audience participants can use WiFi or 4G as they are only receiving transcriptions or translations and their data requirements are much lower.

How to set up customized content

Depending on what you’re presenting you will probably want to customize how Presentation Translator “understands” your content.

Here are a few tips to set-up CSS:

• Include all relevant content: Don’t forget your presenter notes! Before CSS “learns” your content, the content needs to be present within the slides or slide notes. Full sentences will be used for word contexts, so a full script of your presentation within the slide notes will be useful.
• After you click “Start Subtitling”, a dialogue box will appear to set-up your presentation. Make sure to check the box that says “Personalize speech recognition” so it can customize your presentation speech model*. This will take 3 to 5 minutes depending on the length of your presentation.
• Train in advance. Content, notes, and audio logs will be retained by the service for thirty (30) days from last use to support future presentations. You only need to train the system again if you have updated content or it’s past 30 days since the last training.

* Currently only English and Chinese are supported.

Microsoft Translator live feature

Now that your audio, visual, and presentation content are ready to go, you can now start presenting! This is where audience participation can play a role – to expand the audience that understands your content, or invite them to comment in real-time in their own language.

Here are a few tips to set-up the Microsoft Translator live feature:

• After you click “Start Subtitling”, a dialogue box will appear to set-up your presentation. Under “Additional Settings”, make sure to check the box that says “Add instructional slide”. This will explain to the audience how they can view subtitles on their own devices.
• The add-in will then insert the instructional slide before the start of your presentation. These instructions will allow your audience to easily join the conversation (up to 100 people) on their device, in their language.
• You can choose to “unmute” the audience – allow comments directly from their device – or “mute” the audience so your presentation is uninterrupted. You can simply click “Audience Unmuted” towards the end of the presentation for an interactive Q&A session.