Artificial Intelligence in Office 365 – Part 1: Microsoft PowerPoint
Artificial Intelligence AI is no longer a distant future technology. Microsoft already provides AI services such as Azure Machine Learning, the Azure Cognitive Toolkit or pre-trained AI apps and agents in its Azure cloud. Office 365 is also at home in the Microsoft Cloud and has access to these AI resources - and suddenly completely new functionalities are possible. In a multi-part series, we show how artificial intelligence in Office 365 supports people and companies in their work. Part 1 deals with the PowerPoint presentation suite.
Presentations can be a real challenge - especially when important business decisions need to be made. It is challenging to convey the right messages in the optimal form on PowerPoint slides. And once the set of slides is in place and the feedback from all the necessary stakeholders has been included, the presentation still has to be presented. The choice of words, the timing and the authenticity of the “live performance” make a decisive contribution to whether the core messages reach the audience or not.
But help is at hand. PowerPoint supports users thanks to artificial intelligence in easier creation, practice and effective delivery of presentations.
Create presentations in PowerPoint more easily with design ideas
Designer is the name of the function that analyzes the content of PowerPoint slides and independently makes suggestions for attractive designs. In April 2019, Microsoft announced that one billion slides had already been created using the designer. A presentation about the record tennis player and Swiss national hero Roger Federer serves as a demonstration. The user starts with a new presentation and inserts a title and an image on the title slide. The PowerPoint designer immediately starts working in the background and after a few seconds opens a sidebar with design suggestions.
There are now various design suggestions to choose from, which can be adopted with a single click. This shows: The PowerPoint designer recognized Roger's face in the image as a face and takes this into account in the layout design.
If the user has not inserted an image themselves, the PowerPoint Designer will make suggestions and suggestions takes into account keywords used in the title such as “Tennis”. The illustrations in the suggested layouts now include tennis balls, nets, rackets, etc.
This works well as long as the terms used are in the English-speaking vocabulary. While the designer has no trouble recognizing the word Airplanes and making appropriate image suggestions, the design ideas for “Airplanes” are not entirely convincing at the moment. Although the images are visually appealing, they have nothing to do with the topic of aircraft.
The situation is similar with a newly available function called “Perspectives”. When PowerPoint detects that large numbers are used on a slide, it automatically converts that number into more understandable information in the suggested slide designs. As an example from English: Airplanes fly at an altitude of 30 feet. The PowerPoint designer suggests the subtitle “approximately the height of Mount Everest.” However, the PowerPoint AI is currently not yet proficient in German and the function can only be used with English-language expressions.
According to Microsoft, Artificial Intelligence AI is the next big wave that will significantly change our technologies. However, developing a trustworthy, democratized AI is a major challenge. Because how an intelligent algorithm behaves is directly linked to the data set with which it was trained. If training data contains a tendency, this tendency will be reflected in the algorithm. If we trained a voice AI only with voice recordings from Basel, the AI would also speak the Basel dialect. In the book The Future Computed – The social significance of artificial intelligence AI Microsoft explains in detail the questions we as a society need to ask ourselves so that AI will benefit everyone.
“There will not be a single application or experience developed that will not be characterized by artificial intelligence.” – Satya Nadella, CEO of Mircorosft.
Practice giving presentations with the Presenter Coach
The Presenter Coach is a practical AI trainer who gives valuable tips when practicing presentations. The coach has these skills because he can recognize and analyze language. The presenter coach pays attention to various things:
- Pace of speech
So that the spoken information can be better absorbed by the people present in the room, the presenter coach pays attention to the speed of speech and recommends a higher or lower speaking pace. - Choice of words
When choosing words, the coach pays attention to two things: On the one hand, he recognizes unnecessary filler words, and on the other hand, he gives advice on formulations that can be optimized - Read slide text
A classic that can destroy the effect of presentations: the person presenting has their eyes glued to their own slides and reads the written text 1:1. The presenter coach notices this in the training and makes its presence felt
At the end of the training round, the speaker coach summarizes the findings. It will be found in the PowerPoint online app under the “Slide Show” tab. The rollout is still imminent and the function is currently online with the status “in public preview” for the English-language version of PowerPoint.
Present effectively with automatic subtitles
The fact that speech recognition in Office 365 has matured is shown not only by the speaker coach, but also by the automatically generated subtitles. In presentation mode, PowerPoint listens and transcribes the spoken word as subtitles on the slides. The subtitles can be set via the Slide Show tab under Subtitles, or can be easily switched on and off in the speaker view. It is important that the speaker speaks clearly and that the language is set correctly in the subtitle settings.
Since the speaker language and the subtitle language can be set independently of each other, PowerPoint can even act as a translator!
Find out more about artificial intelligence in part 2 and discover Microsoft Excel. The third part deals with the same style Microsoft Word.