How to turn Google Slides into a video (with a voiceover)

Open the File > Download menu in Google Slides and you'll find PowerPoint, PDF, plain text and a handful of image formats. You won't find MP4. Google Slides has no built-in way to export a deck as a video file.

Some Google Workspace plans do include a Record button in Slides, which captures you presenting (camera and voice over the slides) and saves the recording to Drive. Whether you have it depends on your plan, and it's a recording of you giving the talk, so it's closer to a screen recording than an export.

Every other route goes through another tool. Here are the ones worth using.

Option 1: Screen record the slideshow

The most direct route. Start the slideshow in Google Slides, start a screen recorder, and present out loud.

On a Mac, QuickTime Player (File > New Screen Recording) or the Cmd+Shift+5 toolbar both record the screen and your mic. On Windows, the Snipping Tool now records video, and the Xbox Game Bar (Win+G) works too. On a Chromebook, the screen capture tool in Quick Settings records the screen with microphone audio. Loom and OBS work everywhere.

Two tips that save a re-take:

Present in a browser window sized to 16:9, or use full-screen slideshow mode, so you don't capture the browser tabs and bookmarks bar.
Turn off notifications first. A chat popup in the corner of slide 6 means recording again.

Good: free, quick, works on any computer, and you can switch to a live demo mid-talk. Bad: it's one take. Any stumble means trimming in an editor or starting over, and the result is only as tight as your delivery was that day.

Option 2: Download as PowerPoint and export from there

If you have PowerPoint, this gives you the nicest result of the manual routes.

In Google Slides, go to File > Download > Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx).
Open the file in PowerPoint and check it. Fonts sometimes get swapped, and some animations don't survive the trip, so click through every slide.
Record narration with Slide Show > Record. PowerPoint saves your voice and timing per slide, so a mistake on one slide means redoing that slide only.
Export with File > Export > Create a Video (Windows), or File > Export with MP4 chosen (Mac), and use your recorded timings and narration.

On a Mac, you can do the same thing in Keynote: it opens .pptx files, and File > Export To > Movie turns a recorded slideshow into a video.

Good: per-slide recording is far easier to get right than one long take, and the export is clean, with no browser chrome. Bad: you need PowerPoint or Keynote, conversion can break formatting, and you're still the narrator.

Option 3: Drop the slides into a video editor

Download the deck as PDF or as images, import the pages into a video editor (iMovie, Clipchamp, CapCut, Premiere, whatever you have), record a voiceover track, and line up each slide against the narration.

This is the most work of the three and gives you the most control over timing, music and captions. It's worth it for a video people will watch many times, like a course intro. For a one-off update, Option 1 or 2 is faster.

Write the narration first

Whichever route you take, the same few habits make the difference between a slide video people finish and one they close:

Write the script, even as rough notes. The speaker notes panel in Google Slides is a fine place for it, and it travels with the .pptx download.
Plan on about 150 words per minute of narration. Ten slides at 30 seconds each is around 750 words.
Keep one idea per slide. A slide you need a full minute to explain is two slides.
Add what the slide doesn't say. Reading the bullets aloud is the fastest way to lose people.

Option 4: Get a narrated explainer made from the deck

The routes above all produce a recording of your slides with your voice over them. Sometimes that's not what you need. If you want a short video that explains what the deck covers, for people who weren't in the room, a generator can write and narrate it for you.

Rekka does this. It doesn't take a Google Slides link, so download the deck first:

In Google Slides, go to File > Download and choose Microsoft PowerPoint (.pptx) or PDF document. Either works.
Open the chat at rekkaai.com/app and attach the file.
Send it. Add direction if you want ("explain this to customers, not the sales team", "focus on the roadmap slides", "in French"). With no message, the video covers the whole deck.
The finished mp4 appears in the chat. Download it or share it with a public link.

Rekka reads what's on the slides (text, diagrams, tables, charts, equations), writes a narration script from them in your deck's own terms, and draws the explanation as a hand-drawn video in a whiteboard, chalkboard or crayon style. The narration is an AI voice. You can also ask questions about the deck in the chat first, which costs no credits.

More on this on the Google Slides to video page.

What to expect from the generated version

Know what this route does before you use it on a deck you care about.

It doesn't replay your slides. Your layouts, animations and transitions don't appear in the video. Rekka writes a new explanation and draws it scene by scene, so it reads as a whiteboard explainer of your material.

It doesn't read speaker notes. A deck where all the substance sits in the notes will give a thin video. Paste the important notes into your chat message alongside the file.

Up to 30 slides go in per message. One credit makes one video of about 100 seconds, and new accounts get one free credit. On the free plan, the video is a single ~100-second chapter summarising the deck. Paid plans can make longer, multi-chapter videos, and you see the length and credit cost and confirm before anything is made.

You can pick landscape, square or portrait.

Which route to pick

If you just need a recording of the talk, screen record it. It takes ten minutes.

If you want a polished recording with your voice and slides, download as .pptx and use PowerPoint's export with recorded narration.

If you'd rather the video explain the content than show the deck, use a generator.

Common questions

Can you export Google Slides as an MP4?

No. Google Slides downloads as .pptx, .odp, PDF, text and images, but not video. Use screen recording, the Record feature if your Workspace plan has it, or download as .pptx and export a video from PowerPoint or Keynote.

How do I add voice to Google Slides?

You can insert an audio file from Google Drive onto a slide with Insert > Audio, and it plays when you present. For a video with voiceover, record yourself presenting with one of the methods above.

Do my speaker notes come through?

Downloading as .pptx keeps the notes. A PDF download doesn't include them by default. Either way, Rekka works from what's on the slides and not the notes.