Dictate in any app · Presentations
PowerPoint's slides need few words; its speaker notes need many, and nobody writes them. Typally works at the keyboard level, so anywhere PowerPoint accepts typing, it accepts your voice instead.
This is a vendor guide from the makers of Typally. Anything we say about PowerPoint is worth verifying — third-party features change without notice.Microsoft 365 builds include Dictate on the ribbon, plus live subtitles while presenting — a different feature aimed at the audience rather than at authoring.
Slide text should be short, so dictation barely helps there. Speaker notes are the opposite: they should be full sentences, they are what you actually say, and they are almost always left empty because typing them is a chore.
In practice people use it for: Speaker notes, the narrative behind each slide, handout text, and rehearsing a talk by saying it into the notes pane.
Nothing changes inside PowerPoint itself. Typally sits in the tray and types into the focused window:
Install, sign in, and it waits in the tray.
The cursor position is the whole instruction — PowerPoint routes the keystrokes from there.
Push to talk, say your piece, release to transcribe.
Dictating with a slide selected rather than a text box puts text nowhere useful. Click into the notes pane or a placeholder first.
Typally types into the notes pane while you rehearse, so the speaker notes get written in your actual speaking voice during the run-through rather than typed afterwards from memory. Click into the notes pane or a placeholder first — with a slide selected, the text has nowhere useful to go.
Someone builds a twelve-slide deck at four in the afternoon and rehearses it once at five, with dictation running into the notes pane. By the time the run-through ends the speaker notes are written, in the words that actually came out during the rehearsal.
Present the deck to yourself out loud with dictation running in the notes pane. You rehearse and write the notes in the same pass, and the notes end up in your actual speaking voice.
Dictating with a slide selected rather than a text box puts text nowhere useful. Click into the notes pane or a placeholder first.
Yes. The notes pane is a normal text field, so both Microsoft's Dictate and any system-level tool reach it.
A presentation feature that captions what you say for the audience in real time. It does not write anything into the file.
Yes — it is a browser page, so a system-level tool types into it.
Start on the free plan (100 minutes a month, no card). Pro lifts the cap and adds meeting notes for $7.99/month.
Also dictate in: Google Slides · Microsoft Word · Miro · see all apps