Google Slides 'Insert Audio' option goes missing from presentations; devs working on fix

Google has constantly been updating Google Workspace, which was formerly known as G Suite, to better meet the needs of both office and remote workers. This has especially picked pace ever since the onset of the pandemic.

Of course, much of such efforts are to cater to the recent rise in the usage of such productivity and collaboration tools owing to the huge jump in work-from-home opportunities.

But with rapid changes also come some unexpected bugs and the most recent one is the case of the missing option to insert audio into presentations on Google Slides.

The right kind of audio can add something extra to your presentations. It can be a simple background score that plays with the introduction or at the end or maybe a voiceover that describes the content being displayed.

This little feature is obviously extremely useful for students and for office work alike and its lacking has raised concerns from its users. This is pretty apparent from a bunch of complaints on the Google forums.

Last week I created a presention with audio but this week the option “Insert -> audio” no longer shows in my google slides presentations. Tha audio from older presentations is still there. I just can no longer insert new audio. What is wrong?
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I was able to use this function since the beginning of the year and today I suddenly realize the option is not available to me. I have checked this on several Google accounts I have, 1 out of 5 have this function. What is the problem here? Is it an account issue?
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Going by complaints, the option to add audio has gone missing from the ‘Insert’ tab since the past 4-5 days for no reason at all.

Moreover, this issue is reproducible across all platforms like macOS, Windows, and iPadOS and on various browsers like Chrome, Edge, and even Safari. This means that the problem is indeed at Google’s end.

Now, some users did note that a bunch of updates was rolled out to Google Workspace within the last week, thus making it highly likely that one of them actually broke something in Google Slides causing the insert audio option to disappear.

Also worth mentioning here is that not everyone, or not all accounts to be precise, is affected by this issue. This indicates that the purported bad update has only been rolled out to select users/accounts for now.

Nonetheless, the issue isn’t something to worry about too much as the bug has already been escalated and the developers at Google are working on fixing it as we speak.

Therefore, a fix should roll out for it soon. When that happens, it shouldn’t really require any intervention from your end as Google Slides is obviously a web app. Hence, the missing insert audio button should just magically reappear.

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