The most popular request in my Gen AI workshops is: “How can AI do my PowerPoint decks for me?”. Over the past three years of training people in Gen AI, the methods have evolved along with consumer LLMs like ChatGPT and Gemini.
The current method I teach is: Upload your content into the LLM to summarise into slides, then you can either lay it out manually in PPT/Canva, or get Gamma to generate the slides on the fly (Gamma’s not great yet, but it’s been improving).
Now, Google has introduced a new method in NotebookLM, its crazy all-in-one AI data repository. You can now generate a PDF of slides that reference your uploaded content, and in the style of your choice!
If you don’t write a prompt, the slides look quite generic. For this deck based on four research papers about Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), my prompt was : “A slide deck with white background, using palette of primary colors, comic book style graphics and headline fonts, not more than 3 bullets or pieces of content per slide.”
THE GOOD
✅ Your pretty slides will get people to pay attention.
✅ The generated images are great, and there are no spelling errors.
✅ You don’t have to think.
THE BAD
❌ You don’t get to think – the content is out of your hands.
❌ The resolution of the PDF is quite low.
❌ You can’t download the deck as an editable PPT.
Anyway, you should try it out! I’m going to upload my old book “Anyone Can Lose Weight” and see what kind of slides NotebookLM makes.