For years, educators have been begging Google to allow them to add voice overs, sounds and other audio files to a Google Slides presentation. After all, PowerPoint has had this feature forever. There have been workarounds, like adding a YouTube video and making it super tiny somewhere on the slide. But these were just hacks, not true audio support.
Rejoice, fellow educators for Google hath listened to your plea!
Google has just added the ability to add audio to your Google Slides presentations.
(I’ll wait while you do your happy dance!)
There is one caveat, though. While, it’s pretty simple to add audio to a slide, that audio must already exist in your Google Drive in WAV or MP3 format. You can download audio files from the web or create your own.
So how does one create this audio? Well, on a Mac you can use the built-in QuickTime Player to record. Another option on Mac and Windows is the free Audacity. There are several options on Chromebooks, and Eric Curts has done a great tutorial about this very topic.
So once you’ve recorded your audio, how do you put it in Slides? That’s pretty easy as well.
First, go to the Insert menu and choose Audio.
Find the audio file in your Google Drive, then click Select.
Now your audio will be on your slide! Feel free to move it around as needed.
We also can change the audio format. To do this, select the sound and then choose Format options from the toolbar.
The format options screen will pop up. Here you can set options such as whether or not the sound will play automatically, if it will loop, sound volume, etc.
There you have it! Audio in Google Slides. Thanks, Google!
I’m Chris Malanga and I’ve been an Educational Technologist with the Northern Buckeye Education Council/NWOCA since 2016. In this role, I help teachers, administrators, and students integrate technology into our schools. My passion is helping people develop skills to change the world of education!