The Logical Blog by IconLogic

ISPRING SUITE 10: Now with Text to Speech

iSpring continues to improve its eLearning development suite of tools. The latest improvement is Text to Speech and it works really well.

To use the Text to Speech feature, first, add the voiceover script to the slide notes. (You'll be able to use this script along with the Text to Speech feature. No retyping, no extra work.)

Select the iSpring Suite 10 tab on the PowerPoint ribbon and click Manage Narration.

Click the Audio drop-down menu and choose Text to Speech.

From the lower left of the dialog box, click the Insert text from notes button.

The script you added to the slide notes earlier appears in the main area of the window.

Select the language and voice from the menus as appropriate. If you'd like, preview the voice by clicking the Preview voice button.

Click the Insert button, select the slide you'd like to receive the audio, and then click the Insert button again.

The audio appears on the Timeline. You can edit the audio clip as you would any other audio file. And you can preview the finished audio here as well.

If satisfied with the results, click Save & Close to return to the project.

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If you'd like to learn more about iSpring Suite 10, check out our step-by-step workbook: iSpring Suite 10: The Essentials.

iSPRING SUITE 10: No Faster Way to Go From PowerPoint to eLearning

I've recently wrapped up work on my iSpring Suite 10: The Essentials step-by-step book. And as I created eLearning in the iSpring tool, I was struck with just how easy it is to take existing PowerPoint presentations to eLearning.

For those of you who aren't familiar with iSpring Suite, let me fill you in.

It’s likely that you’ve used Microsoft PowerPoint at least a few times. As far as I’m concerned, PowerPoint is an awesome program, and you can easily create visually stunning presentations with the tool. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the presentations created with PowerPoint are not very good. I’m betting that you have seen your fair share of presentations containing too many slides packed with as much text and clipart as possible. There’s often an obnoxious use of colors and fonts. The layouts are predictable and boring. Most of the slides have a main headline, a subhead, a bulleted list, clipart images, and copious amounts of animation (the bullets fly here, there, everywhere. There’s a name for those kinds of presentations: Death by PowerPoint. 

When learners are threatened with Death by PowerPoint, most will either avoid the presentation or quickly click from one slide to the next to end the misery as soon as possible. There’s typically little interaction in those deadly presentations beyond clicking forward and back buttons. 

Given how PowerPoint gets most of the blame when someone presents a Death by PowerPoint, it’s easy to be a PowerPoint hater. However, I am not a hater. I happen to think that in the hands of a creative person, PowerPoint can be used to develop great presentations. While I love PowerPoint, it cannot be used to create compelling, engaging eLearning—asynchronous training content is available online, 24-hours per day, 7 days per week.

Why can’t you create awesome eLearning with PowerPoint? First, PowerPoint does not feature the kind of interactive tools necessary to engage learners. I know, you can animate anything and everything, and you can add interactive buttons to a PowerPoint slide. But animations and/or forward and back buttons do not constitute a high level of learner engagement. In most PowerPoint presentations, there’s little to no opportunity to gauge learner comprehension of the content because most versions of PowerPoint do not include scoreable quizzes. Recent updates to PowerPoint do finally allow you to add quizzes via Forms, but the feature is limited.

When the time comes to deliver content created in PowerPoint to learners across the globe, there’s no HTML5 output to allow for seamless viewing over a web browser. Learners either need to have PowerPoint installed on their computers or download the PowerPoint player from Microsoft. And although you can upload a PowerPoint presentation into a Learning Management System (LMS) as a course asset, there is no way to make the presentation SCORM or AICC-compliant so that learner progress can be tracked by the LMS or administrators.

So what do you do when the boss tells you to use PowerPoint to create the company’s flagship eLearning course? You get yourself an eLearning development tool, and that’s where the iSpring Suite comes in. The suite is a collection of awesome tools that work with PowerPoint to help you create killer eLearning courses. 

After installing the iSpring Suite on your computer and then starting PowerPoint, you’ll find that there’s a new tab on the PowerPoint Ribbon: iSpring Suite. The image below shows the iSpring Suite 10 tab, along with its specific set of eLearning tools.

At the far left of the iSpring Suite 10 tab, you’ll find recording tools for both audio and video. As you move right, you’ll see tools for adding interactions, characters, and more. You’ll learn to use most of the tools on the tab, along with some of the standard PowerPoint tools, as you move through the guided activities in my book.

Seriously, if you need to create eLearning and you've already got the PowerPoint content, iSpring Suite makes quick work out of the eLearning creation process. You've just got to check out this tool.

ISPRING SUITE 9: Video Demos with Annotations Equals Awesomeness!

If you have content in Microsoft PowerPoint and need to use it for eLearning, you'll be happy to know that the top eLearning tools (Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and TechSmith Camtasia) allow you to import PowerPoint content and then output HTML5 or videos. In the case of Storyline, the imported PowerPoint content can even be edited from within Storyline post-import.   But what if you wanted your PowerPoint content to stay in PowerPoint and still be able to add eLearning-type features such as a quiz and interactive objects? Unfortunately, while PowerPoint excels at visually stunning presentations, it's not an eLearning development tool. Fortunately, tools like Adobe Presenter, Articulate Presenter, and iSpring Suite allow you to add eLearning capabilities to any PowerPoint presentation.   I've spent a significant amount of time over the past few months using iSpring Suite, a PowerPoint-based authoring toolkit that allows developers to create mobile-friendly eLearning courses complete with slides, quizzes, dialog simulations, software video demonstrations, selfie-videos, and other interactive learning content. The finished course can quickly be published as HTML5 or as a video and uploaded to a web server, Learning Management System, or to video services like YouTube or Vimeo.   In the next few articles, I'm going to delve into some of my favorite iSpring Suite 9 features. I'm also rolling out an iSpring Suite book ("iSpring Suite 9: The Essentials") and an iSpring Suite 9 instructor-led class!   This week I tested iSpring's ability to create a video demo similar to what you can do in Captivate, Storyline, and Camtasia. During my testing, I was happy to see that iSpring even adds Annotations to the recording (automatic text captions).

To begin, I visited the iSpring tab on the PowerPoint Ribbon, Insert group, and then clicked Screen Recording to open iSpring Cam Pro.

I clicked New Recording which opened a recording area with controls similar to the other top eLearning development tools.

I clicked the red record button and within seconds had an awesome video demo.

When the recording was complete, I expected a standard video just like the other tools. However, the resulting Recording Complete screen offered a nice surprise--the check box Add annotations to the screen recording (shown circled below).

Of course, I selected the Add annotations option clicked the Continue button. I was surprised by how awesome the resulting text was (almost no editing needed).

I was also happy to see that, like the other competitors in the eLearning development tools space, there's a Timeline allowing me to quickly change when the annotations appear onscreen, and for how long.

I was able to edit the annotations and change the way they looked via the Formatting toolbar. All-in-all, this is awesome!

Next time: Dialog simulations.

***   Looking for iSpring Suite training? Check out these live, online, instructor-led training classes (all Guaranteed to Run).

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Kevin Siegel is the founder and president of IconLogic, Inc. He has written hundreds of step-by-step computer training books on applications such as Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe Presenter, and TechSmith Camtasia. Kevin spent five years in the U.S. Coast Guard as an award-winning photojournalist and has three decades’ experience as a trainer, publisher, technical writer, and eLearning developer. Kevin is a Certified Master Trainer (CMT), Certified Technical Trainer (CTT+), Certified Online Professional Trainer (COTP), and a frequent speaker at trade shows and conventions.