Creating truly compelling presentations can require some serious PowerPoint Kung Fu, but, with its just-released Adobe Voice app for the iPad, Adobe wants to change all that. The free app records your voice and lets you add clip art, photos, and music, all from a huge royalty-free library. Voice makes it easy to build and share well-designed presentations consisting of slideshows with voiceovers and captions, but it's not without limitations—the lack of embedded video is a big one.

Getting Started with Adobe Voice for iPad

Available on the iTunes App Store, Voice is iPad-only, It's a not-svelte 207MB download, so if your tablet is running short of storage space, you may want to hold off. The first order of business is to decide whether to OK Voice's request to send Push notifications. It wouldn't be an app launched in 2014 unless it wanted to nudge you with Push notifications, would it? One thing I did appreciate was that I didn't have to create or sign into an Adobe account to start using the app. I was all the more disappointed that, when I finished my first project and wanted to share it, I did have to sign into an Adobe account.

Interface

The app's interface could hardly be clearer. The Welcome page sports a huge Create a New Story link at the top to get you started on a new project. Some sample stories are shown at the bottom to give you a taste of what the app can do. Tapping the Welcome title launches a short video explaining what the app is all about: recording your voice and adding images and text to build a slideshow-like presentation. It's not possible to add video content to a Voice project, even though the final output is a video. The interface is equally comfortable with your iPad in landscape or portrait orientation.