Audio narration is an integral part of an eLearning course and till now one needed to hire external resources to do voice overs to their projects. Gone are those days – You can now do it yourself using Adobe Captivate 4’s new text-to-speech feature.

But there is one limitation in this. Only the text in slide notes panel can be converted to speech. Now when recording (capturing) an application, Captivate generates auto captions for all the steps involved. This is a huge time saver.  You might now want to convert these captions to audio narration, as these captions are already telling a story and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You can do it in following way –

• Go to each slide. Find the captions you want to convert. Write the text to notes panel and convert to speech.
• To save time you can copy paste the text of captions to notes panel.

The drawback to above approach is that there is a lot of manual steps needed and finding each caption and pasting it to the notes panel in a large project can be tedious.

Here is a simple tip to enhance your productivity in converting these auto captions to voice over narrations:

• Open the captured project where you want to use this functionality.
• Go to menu – Audio -> Record. You get the following dialog. Though this is audio recording dialog but we will use just a part of its functionality to alter our slide notes –

• It shows both captions and slide notes. All the captions in the slide are shown.The slide in example has two captions.
• Here is slide notes panel –

• Copy the captions and paste here and do the edits if you want .

• You can use to move between the slides and repeat the process for each slide.

Once you are done say OK to this dialog. The text has been applied to the slide notes panel. You can go ahead with using text to speech functionality now to covert these captions to voice-over narrations using slide notes panel.

adobe captivate,slide notes,text to speech,eLearning