Presentation Translator

In December 2016, our team launched the Translator live feature which lets users have live, translated conversations in real-time. We’re the first to offer real-time translation, giving people a personal universal translator directly from their mobile device when connected to the internet.

We saw how powerful this technology was and how it’s a valuable resource when language is a barrier, so we leveraged this technology and incorporated it into Presentation Translator for PowerPoint.

Partnering with the Garage to launch Presentation Translator gave us the opportunity to reach a broader audience of tech enthusiasts, collect feedback, iterate, and implement feature requests that shaped the add-in as it exists today.

After launching in July 2017, the add-in was quickly adopted by PowerPoint users in different use cases.

Presentation Translator was initially developed to translate a speaker’s presentation into other 60 languages. For example, if you speak English and want to translate your presentation into Japanese, you can choose Japanese subtitles and it will capture your audio and translate it on the screen.

We knew from the work our team did integrating Microsoft’s speech translation into Skype (aka Skype Translator) that this was also potentially very interesting for accessibility scenarios.

So, we proactively reached-out to contacts in the education space to use the add-in for a different use case in classroom environments: captioning for hearing impaired students.

A couple of months after launch, customers such as Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) adopted the use of Presentation Translator in a few pilot classrooms. It’s proven to be an invaluable resource for not only deaf or hard of hearing students, but also for international students and to provide class notes for all students.

The features of Presentation Translator were integrated natively into PowerPoint beginning in 2019 before Presentation Translator was retired in 2020.

The Translator team hopes to continue our mission to provide translation technologies like Presentation Translator, to break language barriers and provide a means to accessible communication regardless of the language, use-case, app, and device used.