I once watched a director rehearse a board presentation eleven times in a row without changing a single thing about it, because nobody in the room was willing to tell her she said "so" forty-three times. That's the exact gap AI closes here.
Microsoft’s built-in Speaker Coach (in PowerPoint, free with any Microsoft 365 subscription) tracks filler words, pace, and reading-off-the-slide in a rehearsal report. Tools like Yoodli go further, analyzing real meetings and calls, not just slide rehearsals, and some platforms simulate a synthetic audience you can present to before the real one. Use AI to catch the mechanical habits (pace, filler words, over-reading), and rely on recording yourself and rewatching, still the single most effective low-tech method, for everything about presence and connection that a filler-word count can’t measure.
I once watched a director rehearse a board presentation eleven times in a row in an empty conference room, and not one thing about her delivery changed between rehearsal one and rehearsal eleven. She said “so” at the start of nearly every sentence, sped up dramatically in the last two minutes every single time, and had no idea she was doing either, because nobody in the building was going to tell a director she has a verbal tic.
That’s the actual barrier for most working professionals trying to get better at public speaking. It’s rarely a lack of practice time or a deep-seated fear. It’s that practice without honest feedback just grooves the same habits deeper. You can rehearse a bad pattern fifty times and get extremely fluent at the bad pattern.
This is precisely where AI earns its place, and it’s a narrower job than the marketing suggests. It’s not going to make you charismatic. What it does well is the boring, mechanical layer underneath charisma: pace, filler words, whether you’re actually looking up from your notes, whether your ending rushes. Fix that layer and the rest gets dramatically easier to work on, because you’re not fighting three problems at once anymore.
If you already have Microsoft 365 or PowerPoint, you have this tool for free and most people have never opened it. It’s called Speaker Coach (sometimes labeled “Rehearse with Coach”), and it lives in the Slide Show tab under Rehearse[1].
Turn it on, present your slides out loud exactly as you would for real, and when you finish it opens a Rehearsal Report. Officially, it gives on-screen guidance during your rehearsal about pacing, inclusive language, use of profanity, filler words, and whether you’re reading the slide text word-for-word instead of speaking to it[1]. It also flags repetitive phrasing and wordiness, the kind of thing that’s nearly impossible to notice about your own speech in the moment[1].
The live, on-screen nudges are useful but the Rehearsal Report afterward is where the real diagnostic happens: a pace graph across the whole presentation and a running filler-word count[1]. This is the part that catches what the director in that board meeting never saw about herself: not a vague sense that things went fine, but a specific number and a specific graph showing exactly where the pace spiked.
It works on PowerPoint for Windows desktop and iOS, with an added body-language critique available specifically in PowerPoint for the web[1]. There’s no separate cost and no account setup beyond the Microsoft 365 subscription most professionals already have through work, which makes it the lowest-friction starting point on this list by a wide margin.
The director from the opening story eventually did run her board presentation through Speaker Coach, at my suggestion, mostly out of curiosity rather than conviction it would help. The Rehearsal Report flagged her filler word, “so,” 31 times across an eleven-minute talk, nearly three times a minute, concentrated heavily in the transitions between sections rather than spread evenly throughout.
That pattern told her something a person watching live never would have said out loud: it wasn’t nervousness causing the filler word, it was a structural gap. She hadn’t scripted her transitions, so her brain reached for “so” as a placeholder every time she needed a beat to figure out what came next. The fix wasn’t a public-speaking exercise at all. It was writing one transition sentence for each section change and rehearsing those specifically.
Her second Rehearsal Report, two days later, showed the filler count down to 6, concentrated now in the unscripted Q&A section rather than the prepared portion, which is a different and much less fixable problem, and also a much smaller one. That’s the actual pattern worth expecting from these tools: not a dramatic overnight transformation, but a specific, previously invisible habit turned into a number you can watch move.
Speaker Coach is built specifically for rehearsing a slide deck alone in a room. A different category of tool, built by companies like Yoodli, is designed to coach you during actual meetings, Zoom calls, and live practice sessions, not just solo rehearsals[2].
Yoodli’s public-speaking use case describes analyzing your speaking in real time during meetings and practice sessions, then evaluating each session against defined standards to give objective feedback on pacing, clarity, filler words, structure, and overall presence[2]. The distinction that matters: this catches how you actually perform under real conditions, including the Q&A portion nobody rehearses, not just how you perform reading a script alone.
None of these tools require you to pick just one. Run your slide deck through Speaker Coach for the pacing and filler-word mechanics, then do a live run-through in front of a colleague or a conversation-analysis tool for how you handle the parts that never go according to script.
Most working professionals don’t have unlimited hours to rehearse a single presentation. Here’s a plan built for the realistic amount of time people actually have before a big talk.
This costs nothing beyond a Microsoft 365 subscription most people already have, plus whatever free tier a conversation-analysis tool offers for Week 3. The plan works because it separates diagnosis from fixing from testing under pressure, instead of trying to do all three in one exhausting final rehearsal the night before.
One adjustment worth making if your talk has a hard deadline sooner than four weeks out: compress Weeks 1 and 2 into a single long weekend rather than skipping the diagnostic step entirely. Presenters under time pressure tend to jump straight to full run-throughs, which just re-grooves whatever habit Speaker Coach would have caught in five minutes. A rushed diagnosis is still faster than no diagnosis at all.
| Situation | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Slide-based keynote or all-hands | PowerPoint Speaker Coach | Built for exactly this format, free, no setup |
| Live meetings, sales calls, Q&A prep | Conversation-analysis tools (e.g. Yoodli) | Analyzes real, unscripted speaking, not just rehearsal |
| Building comfort with an audience present | Simulated-audience platforms | Adds realistic pressure a solo rehearsal can’t replicate |
| Final gut-check before the real thing | Recording yourself + rewatching | Free, catches presence and connection issues no AI metric measures |
Based on the documented feature sets of Microsoft Speaker Coach and Yoodli’s public-speaking use case, verified live August 2026[1][2].
The honest takeaway from testing this kind of tool over the years: no single one covers the whole job. Pick based on what your actual speaking situation looks like, not based on which tool has the flashiest demo.
Here’s my honest skepticism about the current wave of AI presentation coaches. Filler-word counts and pace graphs are genuinely useful, measurable, and easy to act on. Charisma, warmth, and the sense that an audience is actually connecting with you are not things any current tool can reliably score, no matter how confidently a product page implies otherwise.
I’ve seen people over-optimize for the metrics a tool tracks, eliminating every filler word and hitting a perfectly even pace, and come out sounding flatter and less human than before, because natural speech has some irregularity in it. The tools are diagnostic instruments, not a finish line. If a rehearsal report says you’re technically clean but a trusted colleague says the talk still felt stiff, believe the colleague.
The other honest limitation: none of this replaces reps in front of real people. A synthetic audience and a filler-word count get you further, faster, than rehearsing alone in silence, but actual nervousness under actual stakes is something you only build tolerance for by doing it, repeatedly, with real consequences attached.
There’s also a quieter risk worth naming: leaning on a tool’s rehearsal report as a substitute for actually understanding your material. A polished, pace-corrected delivery of content you don’t fully understand falls apart the moment someone asks a real question in the room, because no amount of filler-word coaching prepares you for genuine, unscripted thinking on your feet. Use these tools to fix delivery mechanics on material you already know cold, not as a shortcut around actually knowing it.
The director from the earlier example put it better than I could when I checked in with her a month later: the tool didn’t make her a different speaker, it just showed her, in a number she couldn’t argue with, exactly which thirty seconds of her talk needed work instead of vaguely feeling like the whole thing needed more practice. That specificity is the actual product here, not confidence, not charisma, just a clearer map of where to spend a limited amount of rehearsal time.
If you already have Microsoft 365 or PowerPoint, open Speaker Coach (Slide Show tab, Rehearse with Coach). It’s free, requires no new account, and gives you a Rehearsal Report with a pace graph and filler-word count after your first practice run, which is usually enough to reveal a habit you didn’t know you had.
It tracks real, specific things: pace, filler words, inclusive language, whether you’re reading the slide text verbatim, and repetitive phrasing, then summarizes them in a Rehearsal Report with a pace graph. It’s genuinely useful for catching mechanical habits you can’t hear in your own head while speaking, though it can’t judge your overall presence or charisma.
Yes. Tools like Yoodli are built specifically for that, analyzing your speaking during real meetings, calls, and live practice sessions rather than solo slide rehearsal, and evaluating pacing, clarity, filler words, structure, and overall presence against defined standards.
Most people see a measurable drop in filler words or a smoother pace graph within two to three rehearsals once they know specifically what to target, because the report turns a vague sense of ‘that felt off’ into a concrete number. Genuinely reducing nervousness and building presence under real pressure takes longer and requires actual reps in front of people, not just solo AI-coached rehearsal.
It can, if you over-optimize for the specific metrics a tool tracks. Eliminating every filler word and flattening your pace to be perfectly even sometimes produces a stiffer, less natural delivery than a normal amount of human irregularity would. Use the reports to catch clear problems, not to chase a perfect score.
This article draws on Microsoft’s own official Speaker Coach documentation, Yoodli’s published public-speaking use case, and secondary coverage of both tools cross-checked against the official product documentation, all fetched and verified live during this writing session on August 6, 2026.
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