Artificial intelligence tries to coach the best business speaker of all time*

* I am talking about Steve Jobs here, but this is obviously subjective

TL;DR:

PowerPoint has a “Rehearse with Coach” function. It’s decent if you tend to speak too quickly or struggle with your “uhm”s. It isn’t much use for anything else.

If Microsoft really wanted to improve presentations, they should makes these 3 changes instead:

1. Fix the templates to reflect good presentation design
2. Provide slide design guidance
3. Use artificial intelligence to assist with formatting

I hate to admit it, but I actually like PowerPoint. A lot has been said about it making presentations worse over the years but for my uses, it is still a good tool for the job. I’ve been using PowerPoint for somewhere close to 20 years now and while it has improved a lot and I’m using many new features, I’m not someone who reads the release notes. That’s why I am about a year late on “Rehearse with Coach”.

Here’s what Microsoft tell us it does:
Presenter Coach helps you prepare in private to give more effective presentations.

Presenter Coach evaluates your pacing, pitch, your use of filler words, informal speech, euphemisms, and culturally sensitive terms, and it detects when you’re being overly wordy or are simply reading the text on a slide.

I am always looking for ways to improve my presentations, so I decided to give it a try. I’m a fan of modern Microsoft, they make some excellent products that I use daily (VS Code, Power Toys, new Terminal just to name a few), but we are talking about a company that still thinks that this is a useful standard template for a presentation in 2021:

I, nevertheless, decided to give them a chance. I would say that I’m a decent presenter. I do it a lot, with care, I’ve had professional training and a lot of feedback. As a baseline, I needed a truly great presentation though.

Which presentation to choose though? Luckily, the internet (represented here by Inc.) had the answer:

https://www.inc.com/carmine-gallo/5-reasons-why-steve-jobs-iphone-keynote-is-still-the-best-presentation-of-all-ti.html

Interestingly enough, I could not find any recreations of that presentation in PowerPoint. That’s why I’ve recreated the first 10 minutes in PowerPoint (I’m really sorry Steve, I know you would have absolutely hated everything about this but remember the good times Apple and Microsoft had in the beginning). Why 10 minutes you ask? I wanted to give you three very convincing reasons, but I am not going to lie to you, there is actually only one: I actually have a day job that prevent me from re-creating presentations when I’m certain that additional data will create close to no benefit. I also took some artistic license with pictures as they aren’t being evaluated by the “Coach”.

The Steve Jobs nightmare set-up

Luckily Steve’s slides are actually quite spartan, which cut down on the creation time of this “fake Rolex”-version of his famous presentation. After I was done building it, I started up presenter coach, let the presentation run on my iPad and tried to get as close as possible to his slide transitions.

Here’s the report the “Coach” gave Steve for his presentation:

Even after going through the presentation a couple of times, I did not notice any fillers, but I give PowerPoint the benefit of the doubt because it was a recording with clapping and cheering in the background. Originality is something I don’t understand to be honest. Steve reads pretty much every word he puts on his slides; it is just that he uses few of them. I think that the point they are trying to make is the right one: don’t put everything you want to say on the slide, I would just word it differently.

All in all, I struggle to see the use of this function for anyone but beginner presenters. I really wanted to like it. I’ve sat through so many terrible presentations that I welcome anything that can raise the bar a bit. Let’s come back to what MS stated they wanted the “Coach” to help you do: give more effective presentations. That is a lofty goal and, to their credit, I think that the “Coach” actually provides about as much value as can be achieved with a “feature among many”-type of effort. I think that Microsoft should actually concentrate on something else to help people give more effective presentations: the PowerPoint presentation itself. Most people will never rehearse their presentations anyway. I’ve you want to help them, meet them where they are. Here are 3 suggestions that I believe would actually have an impact:

1. Fix the templates. Most standard PowerPoint templates are still terrible. A team should go through and change the design of most elements to reflect good presentation design (I’m looking at you, default list formatting). I feel like they are trying with their “Design Ideas” but that can’t be the best a company as influential as MS can do. Getting someone like Gene Zelazny or Nancy Duarte on board would be a great first step.
2. Provide slide design guidance. The slide templates leave users to their own devices when it comes to what to use when and why. Instead of “Click to add title”, they could provide real advice like “Add short summary”. Even a “Your slide contains more than 500 word. Are you sure you want to further go down in font size? Everyone knows that it will only tempt you into further bad decisions” would be helpful.
3. Use artificial intelligence to assist with formatting. Consultants at big firms use their slide design teams daily. While a lot of their work takes a good eye and an understanding of the content and is, therefore, not easily replicated, there are many basic tasks that would be. Fixing alignment, changing a font throughout a presentation without breaking the formatting, adding icons to slides from the icon library automatically (btw: PowerPoint has an icon library now. I feel like most people over 30 haven’t noticed). All of these would make presentations easier to understand and more pleasant to look at. None of these problems are easy to solve but doing so would further cement MS’s position as a market leader. Make it a paid extra, if you really have to.

What are your favorite PowerPoint functions that are often overlooked? What do you think MS should change in the next version of PowerPoint? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.