Microsoft PowerPoint has an AI assistant that will judge your presentation skills

Not everyone is graced with exceptional presentation skills. If you find yourself nagging friends or family to give you feedback on your next presentation, Microsoft has a better solution for it. In its next summer update, PowerPoint will be receiving a Presenter Coach that provide you with feedback on your presentation skills. [caption id=“attachment_6855221” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Microsoft PowerPoint Presenter Coach.[/caption] The new assistant uses artificial intelligence to listen to presentations and decide how it could be done better. To do so, it uses the computer’s microphone to listen to the presenter and return feedback and improvement pointers. A tiny box appears on the bottom right when you’re ready to give it a go and enter the rehearsal mode. It will continuously give you feedback on your pacing, whether it falls in the sweet spot, so that you can adjust how fast you speak for the audience to understand you better. Use of profanity or sensitive words will be highlighted with suggestions. Even pauses with filler words while speaking such as “ummm” or “ahhh” will be flagged. The assistant is smart enough to understand when you’re directly reading off the slides, and accordingly warns you not to.

When you’re done, the tool will generate a result or ‘Rehearsal Report’ mentioning the total time spent and the total number of slides read. It also gives you a helpful progression of your pace throughout the rehearsal, measured in words per minute. Based on the results, you can then adjust your pacing to keep it more consistent. Additionally, the tool will give you some tips to improve. Microsoft said that Presenter Coach will be coming soon to PowerPoint for the web this summer.