Google Slides is often used to share presentations online. Sometimes, these presentations can be confusing for the recipient unless there is additional information that can help elaborate each slide. While Google Slides, unlike PowerPoint, does not allow recording a voiceover to narrate your slides, you can insert separately recorded audio files to your slides to generate a narration.
Google Slides Voice-Over Recording
You can record your voice-over recordings and save them to a folder in Google Drive to insert in slides via New > File Upload. Google Slides does not support many audio formats, so make sure your narration is in MP3 or WAV format. Otherwise, the file will not show up when you try to insert it in Google Slides.
We recommend that you keep a naming convention for your files that makes them easy to identify so that you can conveniently incorporate them for relevant slides later on.
It is necessary to ensure that your audio files are not restricted. Select one or more files and select Share via right-click context menu.
Ensure all files are accessible via the link for recipients with at least View Only privileges. This will ensure that your audience is able to play the audio from within the Google Slides file. Otherwise, the audio icon will show a message asking the viewer to request access to the audio file.
How to Narrate Google Slides
Once your audio files have been uploaded to Google Slides, and you have unrestricted the sharing of those files, go to your Google Slides Theme and add audio for each slide via Insert > Audio.
Select the audio file with the narration to insert into the current slide and drag it to place it in the desired location on the slide.
After the audio file has been added, you can click to preview the sound. Furthermore, you can customize audio playback options to play the audio automatically or manually, in a loop, and to stop the audio when the slide changes.
To customize the look of the way your audio icon appears on the slide, see the menus below the Audio playback menu on the right sidebar. Using these options, you can adjust the audio icon’s size, position, and color and add a drop shadow and reflection.
Once your narrations are added to respective slides, you can share your presentation and enable the recipients to listen to the narration on each slide automatically or manually (based on your playback settings).
Audio narrations can only be helpful if they are clear and concise, with good voice quality. If you are struggling with context, you can write a script for each slide and read from it to make your narrative more focused.
Make sure you record your narrations in a place where there isn’t any background noise, or you have a noise cancellation headset to cancel out unwanted sounds in the background. It’s always a good idea to playback and check the voice narrations for sound and contextual clarity.
Since Google Slides supports only MP3 or WAV audio formats, you might need to convert your audio narrations to another format before uploading them to Google Drive. You can also use CloudConvert or other Google Drive-supported apps to make conversions from the cloud.
