A Stellar Challenge For You, There is... ‪#‎TheForceAwakens‬

Our partner Acapela Group has just launched a Challenge to create a trailer in relation to the upcoming ar Wars video. But listen to "Will Little Creature" himself present it for you:



As the voice "Will Little Creature" is also available on SlideTalk with the name "English (USA) Yoda (impression)" you can also use SlideTalk to participate in the challenge!

More information about the challenge here:

http://acapela-box.com/wp/?p=625

SlideTalk opens up for corporate accounts

Anyone can easily create an account at SlideTalk by using social media accounts like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft Live. But what about corporate accounts that need to be shared among several employees?
Now it is possible to create a SlideTalk account that can be easily shared among several persons within an organization without need to handle a social account.
Corporate accounts make it easy to share credits and to allow several colleagues and partners to cooperate on slidetalk creations.

Corporate logins are available to anyone who commits to purchase a 1000 credits package or more. For more information and to get started with corporate accounts, send us an email at info@slidetalk.net.

SlideTalk Partnership Program and Cloud API

Here is a great news for all businesses that need to publish information as videos in an automated fashion: Slidetalk has now opened the door to its partnership program allowing creation of SlideTalk talking videos via a cloud API.

Read all about here: http://slidetalk.net/Home/API

This is a call for all companies that are producing slideshows, posting picures with comments to illustrate an article as for instance a house, a dress, an holiday destination, a kitchen appliance, an app, a news portal... Now you can just as easily create a talking video to illustrate the same article, by becoming a SlideTalk partner and integrate the SlideTalk Cloud API into your core services.

Testing Zaption to index your SlideTalk videos

We tested a service called Zaption that allows creating Tours from YouTube videos, meaning that the YouTube get indexed and text comments can be added to it.

Here is an example of how a video created with SlideTalk looks like once converted into a Tour:

You can judge the result for yourself, what do you think? Since Zaption only works with videos published on YouTube, this will be available only for videos shared as PRO or DOWNLOAD (if then published on the user's YouTube channel).

Happy Zapping!

Welcome our new German Voice Claudia

The German voice Claudia joins the SlideTalk family.

Claudia is the latest voice of the new generation of voices from Acapela Group, which are particularly adapt for voice over, narration and, more generally, reading longer texts.

Hear a sample of Claudia here:


Let Claudia take care of narrating your slides, she won't disappoint you!

How to pick a publishing and sharing option

SlideTalk offers 3 ways to publish and share your talking videos, which one suits you best? Watch this talking video to learn more about it.

Slidetalk website now using SSL for full data protection

It's time for some more technical information on our site. If you do not know what SSL and APIs are, that's perfectly OK, all you need to know is that we made improvements on slidetalk.net to provide better performance and strengthen security around your work, images and powerpoints.
To be more detailed, slidetalk.net is now using SSL on all account pages to guarantee full data protection and a secure connection.

We also switched to the more advanced and secure YouTube API v3 to provide improved performance and pave the way for more improved functionalities to come.

How to choose the optimal PowerPoint slide size for a SlideTalk video

Videos, both on YouTube and on the SlideTalk gallery are using a ratio 16:9. Unfortunately the default slide size for PowerPoint is using a ratio of 4:3, which leaves 2 characteristics black areas at the side of the video. See for instance the examples below:

How to change the slide size in PowerPoint to get slides in 16:9 format?

Open PowerPoint, click on the Design tab, choose Slide Size and select the Widescreen (16:9) option. As in the picture below:

We recommend to adjust the size of the slide before starting to work on a PowerPoint presentation, otherwise after changing the slide size you may need to review the design of your slides.

New tutorial: How to create a talking video with SlideTalk

A brand new tutorial for SlideTalk is now available, showing how to convert a PowerPoint presentation or any slide show into an engaging talking video, using an automatic voice over generated from your script using high-quality and multilingual text-to-speech.



To start creating your talking video get started with SlideTalk today. The BASIC publishing option will allow you to create talking videos for free.

8 new background tracks now on SlideTalk

We just added 8 new background tracks.

Discover them here and let them inspire you to your next talking video.
 

Editing tips: Alternative rendering of words in SlideTalk

The Text-to-speech always select the acoustic rendering of a word that is most likely to be correct, given a particular sentence. However we might in some case want to get an alternative rendering of a word, maybe to give more or less prominence to a word, or to correct some acoustic issue.

Now it is possible to get alternative rendering of word simply by typing @alt1, @alt2 or @alt3 before the word in question. Like this example:

What a @alt1 strange world.

In this case we are intructing the text-to-speech to use an alternative rendering for the word 'strange'

The effects of the alternative rendering are often subtle and are difficult to predict in advance, so you need to use a trial and error method.

Watch this tutorial video for an example of how to use alternative renderings of words:

Let our new voice SHARON inspire you

We have added to SlideTalk a new American English voice named Sharon, from the next generation text-to-speech. Listen to a sample with Sharon here:

Inspire your audience! 

Let Sharon be your voice in your next video creation at slidetalk.net.

Sharon in action

Check our new SlideTalk presentation video and listen to Sharon doing some voiceover:

Republish a SlideTalk video with a different publishing option

SlideTalk offers 3 publishing option: BASIC is free and makes videos available on the SlideTalk website, PRO makes videos publicly available on YouTube (and therefore embeddable), and DOWNLOAD makes videos available only for private use, as the videos are not posted anywhere but made available for download as MP4 videos.

Now suppose you have used the BASIC or PRO option, but now you want to remove the video from public websites and republish it as DOWNLOAD, for your own private use, maybe on your intranet, behind a paywall or on your own YouTube or Vimeo channel. Can you do that? The anser is Yes!

How?

Go to your home page and find the video that you published as BASIC or PRO, click "Manage" next to the video preview, and in the following page select "Delete Video".
The "Delete Video" command will remove the video from the public channel and make the SlideTalk editable again. At this point you just go to the corresponding edit page and now you can select to publish the video again as DOWNLOAD.

Create talking videos for free with SlideTalk

SlideTalk converts presentations to talking videos with automatic voiceover, using high quality text-to-speech voices in many languages. Several background music moods are available to bring more life to your video creations.

Starting from today, you can use the BASIC publishing option and produce talking videos for free, share them on social media and engage with your audience using the commentary fields on the video page.

SlideTalk offers also publishing options for publishing videos on YouTube and for creating downloadable videos, to allow you to control exactly how the video is shared and used.

Six new background tracks available on slidetalk.net

Six new background tracks now available for free to all SlideTalk users to add atmosphere, feeling and life to your SlideTalk videos.

Morning Stroll (Happy Jazz)

Get There (Energy Rock)

Stalling (Guitar Hero)

Dancing on Green Grass (Happy Gospel)

Night Music (Mystic Marimba)

C Major Prelude Bach (Classical Piano)

How to effectively market your SlideTalk video using the video information

So you have made a great PowerPoint presentation and created a talking video out of it using SlideTalk. Now how to get viewers to find your video?

Title, Description and Keywords

BASIC videos have a viewer page on slidetalk.net. PRO videos have a viewer page on slidetalk.net and are also published on YouTube.

To make these pages easy to find via search engines it is of paramount importance that you use wisely the metadata fields Title, Description and Keywords.

Therefore we made it possible to provide and edit these fields at any time, both BEFORE and AFTER publishing. For PRO videos the changes will also apply to the YouTube page.

Editing Title, Description and Keywords.

To edit the Title, Description and Keywords after publishing a SlideTalk video, find the video in the list on your own homepage and click "manage":

In the page that opens, edit the Title, Description and Keywords fields:

When you are done with your edit, click on "Update Settings". The Title, Description and Keywords will be immediately updated both on the viewer page of slidetalk.net and, for PRO videos, on the corresponding video page on YouTube.

Conclusions

After updating the metadata of the video, search engines will be able to find your video by using information in the Title, Description and Keywords fields.

January 2015 promotion!

We celebrate 2015 and the recent release of Credits by kicking off an amazing promotion:

Buy 100 credits for just $29 instead of $49.

Get started immediately by logging in into slidetalk, logging in and visiting the buy page.