How to Add Audio to Google Slides

Google Slides give your online presentations a life with attractive themes, embedded videos, hundreds of fonts and more.

Features like pre-made presentations, portfolios and pitches make your work smoother and better.

Moreover, you can access your presentation anywhere from your mobile, tablet, or desktop. So even it doesn’t need an internet connection to create and edit presentations.

However, in order to make your presentation look good, unique and interactive, you can add audio to Google Slides. Since there’s no in-built audio recorder, you need to create and insert the file into the slides separately. Here we will explain how to add audio to Google slides.

Creating Custom Audio

Google slides do not have the feature of creating audio files. Some third-party apps are there to help you create audio files separately and upload them in Google drive.

Recommended online voice recorder apps:

  • Rev (iOS and Android)
  • 123Apps / online-voice-recorder (Internet browser)
  • Vocaroo (Internet browser)
  • Audacity (Mac, PC & Linux)
  • GarageBand (Apple only)
  • SoundCloud (Desktop, iOS and Android)
  • Chirbit (Internet browser & iOS)
  • AudioBoom (Internet browser)
  • AudioPal  (Internet browser)
  • Poodl (Internet browser)

Once the audio is created, save the file on your device. Make sure to create your audio file in .mp3 or .WAV format that Google slide supports.

How to add audio to Google slides

To add the audio to Google Slides follow these simple steps

1. Upload the audio file to Google Drive

In order to upload the audio file in your presentation, Click New and select File Upload. Choose the audio file or files from your device and wait until uploads completed.

new Google drive
file upload Google drive

2. Share the Audio File to Remove Restrictions

To remove the restriction you have to share the audio file. Right-click on the audio file, select Share, set the access level Viewer and click Done.

Notes: You must perform this step before inserting the audio into your presentation. Otherwise, the viewers will not be able to access and hear the audio file.
share mp3 file
sharing audio file
change the restriction to viewer

3. Add audio to Google Slides

To add audio to Google Slides, go to your presentation, click Insert, select Audio, scroll down to find the desired audio file from Google Drive and click Select to confirm.

Once it’s uploaded, you can see an audio icon over the presentation. Now resize and reposition the icon using drag and drop.

4. Adjust Audio Format

In order to adjust the audio format, select the audio, click Format, then Format Options.

format audio file in google slide

To change the way of playing audio in the presentation, choose Automatically or On click from the audio playback section. If you choose to play audio automatically, you can hide the audio icon by clicking, Hide icon when presenting.

format options google slides

To play your audio continuously over the whole presentation, select Loop Audio. And to make the audio available for a slide, select Stop on slide change.

Also, you can move the slider to adjust volume in Volume section.

How to Play the Audio in Google Slides?

To play the audio in Google slides select the speaker icon and then click the play button for an audio preview.

Similarly, if you’re in presentation mode, either hover and click the play button or click the speaker icon to play the audio in Google Slides.

Some Best Free Google Slide Templates

30 Best Free Google Slide Templates | Creative Powerpoint Presentation Design

Conclusion

The process of adding audio to Google Slides may seem a little hectic at the beginning. But once you adopt it, you become confident. 

Being able to add audio is much more fun as it benefits you in several ways. Narrating a slideshow has become easier and you can make an instructional presentation. Additionally, voiceover presentation creates a better learning experience for the students. It allows adding more context and information to each slide while explaining it.

However, the biggest pain is to record the audio. As Google Slides doesn’t have this feature yet, you need to record your audio separately, upload it to Google Drive and then add to the slides. But whatever software or application you use, don’t compromise with sound. With this in mind, use headphones or good microphones to improve the sound quality.