Speaking in front of a group is often cited as people’s worst fear, even more than heights and tight spaces. Public speaking is such a looming fear to many people that they avoid it completely. However, there are times when it’s important to speak in front of a group, and your career can suffer if you don’t have this ability. Often, the real fear behind this common fear is that you will make a mistake and look foolish. With practice, it’s possible to have more confidence in your abilities and enough skill to avoid mistakes.
The PowerPoint Feature That Helps Public Speakers
Toronto Microsoft Partner, Jorge Rojas of Tektonic induces us to a new PowerPoint feature, called Presenter Coach, can help you to get better at public speaking by offering advice about mistakes and weak areas. Presenter Coach runs in the software’s rehearsal mode, and it gives plenty of feedback about your speech. Simply give the presentation, and you will be given tips on how to make it a better one. You don’t have to read it in front of family members or simply hope that it sounds all right. You will get real, concrete feedback that analyzes different aspects of your speech automatically.
Public Speaking Mistakes to Avoid
No one wants to be laughed at or thought incompetent after giving a presentation. Once you have your speech analyzed and make any necessary changes to it, it will be stronger and ready for a live run. Presenter Coach hears your speech and lets you know whether you are talking too quickly for the audience to fully understand your words. It will also alert you if most of your words are simply read from the PowerPoint slides instead of speech that uses the display words as a supplement. If you have a habit of saying non-words, such as uhm or uhh, this will be brought to your attention so you can practice again without using those filler sounds that can dilute your message and distract the audience. If you accidentally use profanity, the feature will bring that to your attention so that you are more cognizant of the words you use.
In today’s world, few things will spark a backlash faster than inadvertently using terms that are insensitive culturally. And now, this AI can help you with that as well. By the time you have read your presentation to Presenter Coach, everything that may offend will be brought to your attention so that you can rephrase things before giving the speech.
Giving a Better Speech
Once you have taken in all of the advice given by the Ai, you will likely want to make numerous changes to what you had written. Then, you can read it out loud again to see if there are any further problems with it. After a few rounds of critique, your speech will be better and more likely to be understood and well received by the audience. Simply knowing that your speech is improved and that you aren’t making any of these common mistakes may be enough to alleviate much of your anxiety surrounding public speaking. Simply being well-prepared and knowing that your message is clear can go a long way toward giving you more self-confidence when speaking.
Using PowerPoint to discover the problems with your speech and make corrections is highly preferable to asking a friend or family member to listen and judge what you say. They are more likely to not bring small problems to your attention, electing instead to complimenting you to boost your self-esteem. However, this can have the opposite effect by not alerting you to easy changes you could make that would improve the presentation. With an AI, there are no feelings or attachments to get in the way of a solid, authentic critique of your work.
