Ep 790: How To Make Slides with AI: Hands on Comparison With the 9 Most Popular Options

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
This is the Everyday AI Show, the Everyday Podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life.

**Jordan Wilson** (0:16)
No matter your role, no matter your industry, no matter your experience level, chances are you still spend a lot of time doing this one thing, making slides, creating those decks, right? So whether that's toiling in PowerPoint, copying and clicking in Canva, or working on a template in Google Slides, just about everyone who sits in front of a computer screen spends time creating slides. And this was one of the areas of the early generative AI phase where the tools really kind of struggled mightily for years. And there was a lot of hoopla over how there wasn't a lot of good AI options. Then kind of silently yet kind of quickly, we got a host of solutions. But I think most people overlooked just how good many of these AI tools are at generating slides, because we essentially saw an avalanche of model capabilities all hit us at once. And I think that reasoning models in agentic systems took away the spotlight as slide generation kind of arrived at the same time. So no one really took notice. Well, we did. And that's why we're going to put AI to work on Wednesday and take a look at at least nine, well, maybe 10 of the best ways to generate slides with AI, all aimed at beginners and we're doing it all live errors, hiccups and all. So which is best? Will PowerPoint shine? What about the NanoBanana Integration and NotebookLM or maybe the old kid on the block with Gamma or the new Token Hungry Claude Design could take the crown? I don't know. We're going to see. Let's find out and get into it. So here is the big picture.
The capability gap right now makes it hard to keep up because I can almost guarantee even if you watch this show every day, there's going to be one of these tools that I talk about and you're going to be like, wait, I didn't know you could create slides that way. And it's just now by default, a lot of these large language models create slides. Right?
It's something that kind of snuck in, in terms of capabilities around six to nine months ago. Like I said, about the same time that we got all of these agentic systems and reasoning models. Right? But I remember telling people like nine months ago, people didn't know that you could just create a spreadsheet in ChaptGPT or create a PowerPoint in Claude and you can't. Right? And finally, now with the Google Gemini catching up to the pack, all of the big players by default can create artifacts like that if you just use the right model and ask it to. So when you combine though your dynamic data inputs and then the personalization and the customization that comes by default out of large language models and schedule those things, you can have on-demand personalized decks, right? And then when you can throw in your brand options as well, a lot of people overlook just how capable this is, right? Because I think slide generation has now turned from a task that so many people spend so much time on to now you can get an on-demand, pretty polished draft at least in minutes. So on today's show, here's what we're going to cover. We're going to go over the pros and the cons of the top nine options and see how they make slides and look at their outputs. So everything from ChatGPT and Claude, Gemini, Gamma, PowerPoint and more. You're going to learn how the tech actually works, at least on the surface level and go over best practices. And you'll instantly, by the end of this, if you put this into practice, you're instantly going to be able to implement going from zero to draft by the end of the show. No more overwhelm, no more confusion. Let's get started. Welcome to Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson and while we do this every day, it's your daily, unedited, unscripted, livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me make sense of the AI noise. These updates are coming nonstop. I tell you what matters, what doesn't, how to use it. You take that information and all of a sudden, you're the smartest person in AI and you can go grow your company and career. Starts here, unedited, unscripted, livestream podcast, but stick it in the next level. Make sure you go to our website, youreverydayai.com. In today's newsletter, we're going to be not only recapping the highlights from today's show in case you miss anything, but also all the other AI news you need to know to get ahead. Yeah, this is going to be one of those episodes that's a little more visual, so you might want to for a podcast audience, yeah, check out today's newsletter and go watch this video on our website. We link to it in the newsletter, it's always on our website too. Let's get straight into it. And let me say this, this is meant to be a quick demo, all right? I'm not going to show you my best practices using one system. I think that, well, I hope at least, that this is going to be more appealing. And this is actually, I put this out in the newsletter, you all voted for this as the thing that you wanted to learn most. I want to start doing more practical guides, right? And instead of going deeper on one system, say, hey, here's how you do data analysis in three to five tools. Here's how you do, create slides or decks. Here's how you can create quick disposable apps or websites. So, gonna take these a little bit more topic-based. But again, I'm doing this very generally. My prompt is gonna be overly simple. I'm not gonna be using codecs or using skills and plugins. I'm doing something that's so simple. Your grandma could go and do the same thing. Or if you are a grandma, you can do it along with me, right? I'm making it that simple, right? The simplest prompt, basic paid plans, nothing crazy. So we're gonna be seeing how a model can correctly follow the input because we're not just gonna be judging the quality, all right? Because models by default are multimodal. You have to be able to understand how they work, the pros and the cons. So the prompt that I'm choosing is intentionally vague. So I can see how these models, number one, handle it. Number two, because we're gonna be indirectly testing prompt adherence, tool calling, and also taste. So again, this is not a final workflow. And if you are doing something like this, right, pick the one that you want, double down, but let's get in. Let's start live. Oh my gosh. Like, I'm not gonna lie, this one I'm a little nervous on. I'm also at Microsoft Build right now. So I just have my little laptop. Normally I have a lot of screens, so might be a little jumping around. Hopefully not.