How to add a Voice Memo to Google Slides

Google Slides will only insert audio in MP3 or WAV format, and it will only insert audio that is already in your Google Drive. There is no option to upload a file straight from your computer during the insert step.

A Voice Memo exports as an .m4a file, which satisfies neither rule. This is why so many people get as far as Insert and then find the audio option greyed out or their file simply missing from the picker: the file is fine, it is just the wrong format in the wrong place.

So the job is four steps: export the memo, convert it to MP3, upload it to Drive, then insert it. Skipping any of the first three is what causes the failure.

Open the Voice Memos app in the Utilities folder. Tap the recording, tap the more button, then tap the share button.

Scroll down and tap Save to Files, then pick a location and tap Save. If you would rather work on a computer, you can share it to yourself by email or message instead, or take it from the Voice Memos app on your Mac if iCloud syncing is on.

This is the step that makes the rest work. Use a Voice Memo to MP3 converter: upload the .m4a you exported and download the MP3 it gives back.

MP3 is the safer of the two formats Slides accepts. WAV works too, but the files are many times larger, which makes the upload slower and the presentation heavier to open, with no benefit anyone will hear on a speech recording played through a room's speakers.

Give the converted file a clear name before you upload it. You will be picking it out of a list in Drive, and a deck with several audio clips gets confusing quickly.

Upload the MP3 to Google Drive, into any folder you like, and wait for it to finish processing. Newly uploaded files sometimes take a minute before they show up in the Slides picker.

In your presentation, open the slide you want, then choose Insert and Audio. Find your file in the Drive picker and select it. A small speaker icon appears on the slide.

Click that icon and open the format options to control how it behaves. You can choose whether playback starts automatically or on click, hide the icon during presenting, loop the audio, and stop it when the slide changes. Autoplay with the icon hidden is what most people want for narration.

Slides does not embed the audio in your presentation. It links to the file in your Drive. That means everyone who views the deck needs permission to open that file, not just the deck.

This is the most common complaint about audio in Slides and it is invisible to the person who made it: the audio works perfectly for you and silently fails for your audience. Share the audio file itself with the same people, or the same setting, as the presentation.

For the same reason, do not move, rename or delete the file in Drive after inserting it. The link will break and the slide will fail to play with no obvious explanation.

A memo that sounds acceptable through headphones can be unintelligible through a projector's speakers at the back of a room. Presentation audio needs to be louder and cleaner than personal listening audio.

Before you convert and upload, bring the level up with a normalizer so the recording is consistently loud rather than relying on the room's volume control.

If there is background noise, remove it first with a noise reducer. Raising the volume of a noisy recording raises the noise too, and room speakers are unforgiving about it.