Today, Google announced a new Google Slides feature that some teachers are going to love. Google Slides now has a real-time captioning system. This system works when you are presenting your slides (full screen) and have a microphone connected to your computer. When you turn on the captioning option Google will automatically create and display captions of what you’re saying to your audience. Those captions will be displayed at the bottom of your slides.

For now this new captioning system is only available if you use the Chrome browser in U.S. English. In their announcement of this feature Google noted that captions may not be accurate if you don’t speak clearly, have a distinct accent, or there is a lot of ambient noise near your computer’s microphone. (Speaking of microphones the ones that I recommend the most are this Snowball Microphone made by Blue Microphones and this omnidirectional lapel microphone made by Insignia).

Here’s a short video introduction to the new Google Slides captions feature.

This feature is being rolled-out gradually. It could be a couple of weeks before you see it in your Google account.

Applications for Education
Automatic captioning of your presentations could make your presentations accessible to more students. Even if you don’t have students who need the captions, it might still be a good idea to turn them on anyway as means to aid your students who are taking notes during a presentation.