How to Add Audio to Google Slides

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In this video, I’ll show you how to add audio or voiceover narration to Google Slides.

Steps to add audio, narration on background music to Slides on Google Slides.

  1. Add audio, music, or narration to Google Drive (Create a folder and share the folder with everyone)
  2. Open your Google slides presentation.
  3. Add audio to the slide you want to by clicking on Insert
  4. Add Audio
  5. Select the Audio you want to add to your presentation.
  6. Make any changes to the audio using the format options.

Video Transcript

In this video, I’ll show you how to add audio or voiceover narration to Google Slides.

Hi, my name is David and if this is your first time watching my videos, and you get value from the content that you watch, kindly consider liking this video and sharing it with your friends, so that we can all learn together.

By default, Google Slides doesn’t support recording audio narration to your slides right on the fly, like you can do it inside Microsoft PowerPoint.

Therefore, you need to record your audio off Google Slides and then upload your audio to Google Drive.

In a previous tutorial, I walked you through the process of recording and editing an audio narration inside Audacity, a free and open source audio editing application.

Therefore, if you haven’t watched that tutorial, kindly go and check it out, where I walk you through the configuration of the mic to recording and editing your audio.

Related: How to Record and Edit Audio Using Audacity

Now, since we’ve already done that, what we need to do now is add our audio to our slides.

Now, for this to work, you need to have your audio inside Google Drive.

So where we are going to begin, we’re going to begin by uploading our audio to Google Drive, and then importing it or inserting it to our slides, or the slide that we need the audio to be.

So let’s begin by going to drive.google.com. And once I click on that, it’s going to open up our drive.

Please note that some sections of this particular drive interface are slightly blurred because of some sensitive information.

Now let’s begin by clicking on New – Folder.

It’s always good to keep your files in sync or in the same folder. Let’s call it–this folder…

Something like let’s say “Google Slides -presentation 1, just click on Create.

And once you click on Create, the new folder is going to open up.

The number one thing that I might begin off with is by right clicking and clicking on share this particular Google Drive folder.

And the reason for that is because I want to make sure that anyone with the link to this particular folder can see the files.

Also, when you share your Google slide presentation, people don’t get an error when they try to play the audio.

So just come to change to anyone with a link.

And here’s your link, and click on Done.

Once you finish that, we can just double click on this particular folder.

And all we need to do is just drag and drop our audio inside this new folder.

Let’s just come to the folder with the slide –with a particular audio, and then just drag and drop it inside there.

Once we do that, depending on the length of your audio, the strength of your connection, it may take a long or short time. But since this is a short file, it just uploaded in just a couple of seconds.

Now, once this is done, let’s go back to Google Slides.

And let’s say the narration that we just added, “slide one for Google Drive”. Let’s say it’s for this particular slide.

So what do we need to do, with a slide selected, just come to insert audio.

And the options to insert audio include from my drive, shared with me, let’s say by a client, or even recent files.

You also have the option to search for the particular audio if you know the exact title or name of a particular audio.

And these are the options to see what type of views or sorting that you may have for your files.

For example, this particular audio that we just added is this particular audio, “slide one for Google Drive”, just click on it, and then click on select.

And once we click on select, it’s going to start creating audio. And here is our audio.

It shows you an audio icon, and a play button and the length of the audio.

And you can also see it or open it in Google Drive.

To the right, a couple of format options.

The audio playback tab here shows us it’s going to start playing on click, automatically.

Also the volume while presenting.

You can hide icon when presenting, the loop audio, stop on slide change, really depends on what you’re going for.

Let’s say you want to automate this particular process.

Or let’s say you wanted to record your Google slide presentation using an application like OBS.

Then what you can do is that you can click automatically, or onclick really depending on how you’re going to be navigating through your presentation.

If you click on that, then you’re going to get the option to hide the icon when presenting but if it’s on click, then you’ll need to see the icon so that you can click on it for it to Start playing.

Let’s say you want to make it automatically.

And since we’re not changing anything else here, we can just minimize that the size and rotation, you can lock the aspect.

Really depends on what adjustments you wants to do, let’s say you want to make it bigger really depends on what you want to do.

Let’s press on Ctrl Z, to just get it back to the default size.

And then you have the options for positioning, recolor, you can either change the color of the icon to whatever, let’s say we give it like this particular color.

That’s what it looks like.

You can make any adjustments that you want for transparency, brightness, contrast, drop shadow, if you want one, not really interested, a reflection if you want one, not really interested.

The main like option or format options that you can really work well with that will boost oil and keep your slides or presentation engaging just include the audio playback section, whether to start playing on clip, or automatically.

Now let’s say it’s automatically and let’s say we want to start presenting, just click on that. And our audio by default.

“Welcome to this video. My name is David it’s good to have you here.”

If by any chance you have read in the next slide, then our presentation is going to stop.

Our video is going to start off with it being mute as we did in the previous tutorial on how to add video to Google Slides.

Related: How to Add Video to Google Slides

And it’s going to play automatically.

Now, that tutorial has been in depth on how you can add audio, voiceover narration or even if you wanted to add music to a slide inside Google Slides.

I hope this video has been a value and that you’ve benefited from the content that you’ve watched.

Until next time, stay safe and never stop learning.

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