Read the Indezine review of Speech-Over Professional 4.
Author: Geetesh Bajaj
Product/Version: PowerPoint
It's often very time-consuming and expensive to record voice-overs with professionals -- of course you can record your own voice these days but not everyone is entirely audible and has the proper pronunciation, vocal control, and confidence to do that. And trust me -- lots of users want to add high quality narration to their PowerPoint presentations so that these can be shown as a sequential walkthrough without a live presenter.
Fortunately, a product that we have reviewed in the past has been updated to make this task automatic, easy, and usable!
BackSpeech-Over Professional 4 is from Tuval Software Industries, a company based in Israel. You can learn more about the product, and download a trial version of Speech-Over Professional 4 from their site.
Speech-Over Professional 4 is a PowerPoint add-in that allows adding professional voice-over to PowerPoint presentations which helps creating e-learning, training and web presentations. The add-in allows adding two types of component audio clips:
In simple terms, the former plays on animation of a shape, and the latter plays when a slide is played.
My contact at Speech-Over Professional 4 for this review was Joel Harband -- thank you, Joel.
BackIndezine has already reviewed Speech-Over 2.5 and Speech-Over 1. Speech-Over Professional 4 is the new version with these extra features:
Download the installer from the link given above, run the setup routine and follow the instructions.
Speech-Over installs as a set of options within the Add-Ins tab of the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007 (and possibly later versions). In addition, it also creates a new tab in the Ribbon called Speech-Over (see Figure 1). Since options in both locations are duplicated, we will explore only the Speech-Over tab within this review.
Figure 1: Speech-Over tab on the Ribbon
When installed, follow these steps to add a narration to a PowerPoint presentation using the options.
All the options of Speech-Over Professional 4 tab are explained below:
Figure 5: Speech-Over Professional 4 tab Options
In this group you'll find tools to add narration to selected shapes in a slide or to the entire slide; a tool to delete the narration clip; provide names to the slide selection and Clip Organizer which opens a dialog box that you can see in Figure 6. This displays the selected slide object's Properties, and you can view the narration clips that compose the slide narration. You can even add a slide clip by clicking the Add Slide Clip button.
Figure 6: Clip Organizer
Here you'll find basic edit options such as Copy, Paste, and Undo, which move clips from one shape to another as well as Refresh Notes, and Refresh All.
The first option in this group is the Notes Editor, when clicked this opens the Edit Slide Clips Content dialog box (see in Figure 7). Here you can change the text content which is used in the narration for all clips on the slide. Slide Show option enables you to preview the slide with the narration clip added; Preferences opens a dialog box (refer to Figure 4 shown earlier on this page). Register displays whether the add-in is registered or not and lets you register the trial version.
Figure 7: Edit Slide Clips Content
Help takes you to the Speech-Over support page. The About option displays the Speech-Over splash screen, and Document Properties allows the user to add the Author name and presentation details.
BackSpeech-Over Professional 4 and two premium quality TTS voices: Paul from Neospeech and Heather from Acapela Group with voice license for commercial use costs for $299.
Support is through e mail, telephone, and FAQ.
BackEven if you need to do professional presentations with studio quality voice-overs, Speech-Over Pro 4 is an amazing product that can act as a stop-gap measure until you finalize the script and get the voice-overs recorded. Who knows, you may like the new TTS voices and use them instead of a recording -- it's quick and easy, and you can't beat that. The price is right too, and with version 4, Speech-Over Pro is a highly mature product.
BackYou May Also Like: Slide Executive Desktop 2.9 | PowerPoint Add-in Reviews (J, K, and L)
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