Powerpoint Subtitling

[Jaded]

Got an event I will be covering* and have just been told that they will be using live subtitling in Powerpoint. This fills me with dread on account of it being PowerPoint and Microsoft. Anyone have any experience of this Powerpoint feature?


*photos and subsequent top-and-tailed videos of the presentations, usually including the presenter in wide screen, and powerpoint slides where appropriate.

[Kim]

*googles*

Okay, I'm mildly impressed that it actually craptions your speech in realtime via the microphone, rather than just audio/video that's embedded in the presentation.

Never used it, but I'm sure the usual disclaimers apply:

- The quality of craptions will always fall somewhat short of a proper human captioner (STTR or even re-speaking).
- Audio quality is everything.  Microphones are a complicated subject with a need for more than one highlighter pen.
- The words it gets wrong will be subject-specific vocabulary or those important for establishing context.  Which makes it useful for taking notes, but rubbish for anyone trying to follow without audio.

I expect it's using the same technology as the craptions in Teams, which (subject to the above) are Not Terrible.  Obviously being a Microsoft product there's a good chance it will fail to work in some nondeterministic way.

[Jaded]

Well, it is gong to be interesting, given this conference will have speakers with interesting terms - drugs, conditions and so on.

Will report back afterwards!

[Cudzoziemiec]

It won't know anyone's name unless specifically taught in advance. It will mishear unusual names as common ones, and spell all names Teh American Way. Anyone with eg an Irish or Welsh name will rendered unknowable.

It will fail to distinguish between consecutive speakers of the same sex. It will also randomly decide there has been a new speaker when someone pauses. If ever there is more than one person speaking at a time, it will record every word but not in the right order and the attribution will be totally random. It will split. Sentences at weird points.

[Bluebottle]

Pretty much what Kim said.

We have real time Teams captions at work, also "special" desktop recording software. Both are hit and miss in their own ways. I am pleasantly surprised by Teams given that we have a lot of scientific terminology and I may have an accent that is... non-RP. Teams did struggle with the phrase, "eckied oot his pus", but in fairness, most people outwith a 10 mile radius of Dundee would struggle with that.

[Bluebottle]

I should point out that I use speech-to-text dictation in Word for feedback and I find it a lot easier than the home edition of Dragon ever was.

[Jaded]

So, an update after half a day...

It seems to work pretty well, with the usual caveats. Names. accents, etc. There is even live correction, which is really weird, given I read that the donkey work is being done over the internet.

Problems include the setup shows the subtitles over the presentation, so if a presenter has used loads of small text... and in most of the seminar rooms, the presenter can walk in from of the screen, thus rendering the subtitles illegible...

We have even had "Thought Leaders" in the subtitles in one session. Sadly I wasn't quick enough to grab a shot of the screen when that came up.