International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) and Microsoft is celebrating it by announcing new features for PowerPoint that make the presentation software more inclusive.

Increasingly, software looks to differentiate itself from the competition not by allowing you to do more, but by doing more for you automatically. Microsoft is enhancing PowerPoint in this way by adding the ability for the software to automatically generate captions and subtitles in real-time for your slides. It means that by default your presentations will be accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing who can now read what is being spoken without any extra work required by the presenter.

Microsoft achieved these new features by using artificial intelligence, but decided to take it a step further. Our presentations are increasingly being enjoyed by a global audience and not everyone speaks the same language. So not only will PowerPoint$8.25 at Microsoft generate live captions and subtitles, it will also handle automatically translating them into different languages. At launch, 12 spoken languages will be supported and subtitles and captions can be written in over 60 languages.