Back in December 2023, Microsoft announced that the web edition of its PowerPoint presentation app added support for inserting videos that included captions. However, those captions must be created in the WebVTT format before they are put into the PowerPoint video.
Today, Microsoft announced an upcoming PowerPoint web feature that should make it much easier to add captions to videos. In a post on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog, the app will add a speech recognition feature that will listen to the audio in the PowerPoint video and automatically generate the captions.
Microsoft says that once the feature is put in place, users who insert their video in a presentation file can then click on the Captions option, scroll through the 63 languages that this feature supports, pick the one best suited for the video, and then click Generate Captions.
The company says that the feature will scan a two-hour video in the PowerPoint app, and it should generate the captions in just a few minutes. Once it"s done, the user can go in and make any corrections to the automatic captions by clicking on the Edit Captions button. The video will play itself automatically when you come to a caption section that you will need to edit.
Microsoft added some tips for using this upcoming feature. When users go in to edit the captions, they can also add the names of each speaker in the video as well, along with any important sounds that are made in the clip.
Also, the automatic captioning feature can be used to translate the video into any of the 63 supported languages, which will open up the PowerPoint video for a wider audience.
You will have to wait a bit longer to try out this new and faster video captioning feature. Microsoft says it will be added to PowerPoint on the web sometime in June.