PowerPoint Rehearsal Coach on the Mac - a Game Changer!

It is not often that a program gets a five star review from me for a new feature, but PowerPoint Rehearsal Coach, the new addition to PowerPoint 365 on Macintosh, is absolutely amazing. "Rehearse with coach" is a new option item under slide show menu. As seen above, at the end of your presentation the coach gives feedback on your pace, the duration of your talk and number of slides. This is just the beginning! It also gives the filler words you frequently use (emm, uhh) - a sure indication that your speech is not yet fluid and you need to rehearse more. Add to that an analysis of your voice pitch (the monotony index), the words you tend to repeat (in my case, the word "very"), plus an analysis of the he and she and other gender specific pronouns to see whether your speech is inclusive. Best of all, because it reads your slides and listens to your speech, it knows when you are reading your slide!

From the User Interface perspective, I did my first rehearsal with the live feedback and found that irritating. When I did something bad like using a filler word (umm), a beep and a corner window showed up with a message to that effect. I ended up saying more emms. because the messages often derailed my train of thoughts! Granted, the coach also showed a window when I did something good like vary the tone of my voice. Don't expect a medal and a fanfare, though. So did the live feature ruin the product? Fortunately, no. You have the option to deselect the live feedback option before you start rehearsing. I imagine that most presenters would use the live feedback at first to detect what they do wrong and later rehearse without it, and learn from the written report they get at the end of their presentations.

This new feature is an excellent use of speech analysis. I wished Apple, my company of choice for presentation software, had the same feature. I will still use Keynote to present, but I will use PowerPoint to rehearse. Bravo Microsoft! You are a leader again! And audiences the world over will rejoice and thank you for the greatly improved quality of everyone's presentations.

A footnote for those who worry about what happens to their recorded words... Microsoft does not store the speech data, so we can all relax!