AI Slides, Rebuilt: Decks With Speaker Notes
AI Slides now runs on the same engine as AI Video Lectures: designed slides from your documents, speaker notes on every slide, a slide-count control, and PowerPoint downloads with the notes included.
Most decks at work start from a document that already exists. It might be an SOP for new hires, a quarterly report for leadership, a product guide for the sales team, or a policy update everyone has to hear about. The slides are a summary of that document. The real work is the talk you give over them.
AI Slides in Scholarly has been rebuilt around that job. It now turns your document into a designed deck and the talk to go with it: every slide comes with speaker notes written from your source.
The short version
- Same engine as AI Video Lectures. Slides now uses the planner, slide designs, and review step behind our video lectures. The script a video would narrate becomes your speaker notes.
- Figures from your sources. Charts, diagrams, and tables come from your PDF where it has them, with pictures added where they help.
- Much faster. Decks, and especially longer paid decks, finish much sooner than they did before.
- You choose the length. Paid plans pick 5 to 30 slides with the Slides slider, and Free plans make 10-slide decks.
- Looks and dark mode. Choose a colour look, or switch the whole deck to dark mode.
- PowerPoint with speaker notes. On paid plans, the .pptx download puts each slide's notes in PowerPoint's notes pane.
Why we rebuilt it on the video lecture engine
Scholarly's Standard video lectures were already making slides. A Standard lecture is a sequence of designed slides with narration over them, and the engine behind it had become good at choosing the right kind of slide for each idea. A comparison becomes a side-by-side, a procedure becomes numbered steps, and a result becomes a chart. A formula is typeset as a real equation, and a figure from your PDF stays a figure.
AI Slides used to be a separate system that did the same job a different way. Now it is the same system without the narration:
- Scholarly reads your source and writes the talk first: what to say about each part, in order.
- It designs the slides for that talk, using the same slide designs as our video lectures: definitions, comparisons, processes, timelines, tables, charts, equations, diagrams, and figures pulled from your PDF.
- It renders every slide as a finished image and then reviews the whole deck at once, the way you would scan a slide sorter. It repairs anything that does not hold up, such as clipped text or an empty slide, before the deck reaches you.
- The talk becomes your speaker notes, attached to the slide it belongs to.
Because both products share one engine, improvements to video lecture slides now improve your decks too.
Turning SOPs, reports, and training documents into decks
This is where speaker notes matter most. A good slide holds a few points and leaves the explanation to the speaker. A deck that has to stand on its own crams everything onto the slide. Separating the two gives you a slide that reads well on a screen and notes that carry the whole explanation.
An operations lead training new hires on an SOP. Upload the procedure and ask for a 12-slide training deck. The slides walk through each step and its checks. The notes say what to emphasise, which mistake to warn about, and which section of the SOP to point people to.
An analyst briefing leadership from a quarterly report. Pick the pages that matter and ask for a short deck. The numbers on the slides come from the report, and the notes hold the context behind each one, so you are not flipping back to the PDF in the meeting.
An L&D or enablement team building product training. Start from the product guide or the release notes. Make one deck per module, and keep the notes as the facilitator's script. Any trainer on the team can then run the session the same way.
A consultant or agency turning a client document into a workshop. Upload the strategy document and ask for a deck for the kickoff. The notes keep you anchored to what the client's own document says.
The same approach works for teaching material, certification prep, and research talks. Start from the chapter, the manual, or the paper.
Choosing the length
Decks used to come out at whatever length the AI decided, and the only way to change it was to ask in your instructions. Now the create panel has a Slides setting, a slider for the number of slides:
- Premium and Laureate: choose anywhere from 5 to 30 slides. New decks start at 15.
- Free: decks are 10 slides.
The deck is planned to the count you pick. A short deck works for a stand-up update, and 25 or 30 slides works for a full training session. Speaker notes keep a short deck from feeling thin, because the detail lives in the notes rather than on the slide.
Most AI models use 1 AI Creation Credit per deck. The model picker shows the cost before you start.
Looks, dark mode, and language
The old named themes have been replaced by looks: colour palettes shared with our video lectures. Choose one, or leave it on Auto and Scholarly picks one for the deck. Turn on dark mode for a dark deck, which suits a darkened room or a screen share.
Decks follow your source's language, and that includes right-to-left text. A deck built from an Arabic or Hebrew document keeps its lines in the right order, and labels on the slides are written in the deck's language rather than defaulting to English.
Custom instructions still steer the content: "focus on the safety steps", "end with three discussion questions", "use our product names exactly as written". Saved Customization Profiles apply your written instructions to every new deck.
Presenting and exporting
Finished decks open in the same viewer as before. Every plan can:
- present the deck full screen, with a grid to jump to any slide;
- share a viewing link.
On paid plans, the Export menu adds:
- PowerPoint (.pptx) with speaker notes. Each slide comes through as its finished design, and its notes sit in PowerPoint's notes pane, ready for Presenter View. You can reorder slides and add your own around them. The slide text itself is part of the design, not editable text boxes.
- PDF, for sending or printing.
- Save to Google Slides, with Google Drive connected.
How to make a deck
- Open Scholarly and choose AI Slides on Home, or Slides from the New menu.
- Add your source: a PDF (you can pick a page range), notes, a link, or a topic.
- Set the number of slides with the Slides slider, then choose a look or dark mode.
- Add instructions if you want to steer the content, and generate.
- Present it, share it, or on a paid plan download the PowerPoint with your speaker notes.
For the full feature overview, see the AI Slides page. For specific starting points, try PDF to PowerPoint or the AI Slide Generator. If you would rather have the narrated version, the same source can become an AI video lecture. Building training decks with a team? Scholarly Teams gives everyone a shared source library and one bill.
