AI Slides

Scholarly can generate fully designed slide decks from your PDFs, your library, or just a topic. The AI plans the structure, writes the content, generates visuals, and assembles the deck for you.

Creating Slides

Slide creation is available from three places:

• Home page: Click the AI Slides card in the action grid.
• Create menu: Open the Create menu in the sidebar and select AI Slides.
• Upload Content modal: After uploading a PDF, choose AI Slides from the follow-up actions.

The Source Picker

The Create AI Slides window opens to a four-tab source picker so you can choose your starting point without scrolling:

• Library: Pick a file you've already uploaded. Defaults to your most recent PDFs.
• Upload: Drag in new PDFs from your computer. How many sources you can combine in one deck depends on your plan: one on Free, up to 10 on Premium, and up to 20 on Laureate.
• Google Drive: Pull a Doc, PDF, Slides deck, or Word file straight from your Drive. See Connections.
• Prompt AI: Skip files entirely and just describe the topic, like "Q3 security-awareness refresher for the sales team" or "Intro to our returns policy for new hires."

You can also paste a link to a PDF or website, and Scholarly will use that as a source. Mix tabs in a single deck, for example, pick two PDFs from your library and add a custom prompt to guide what to emphasise.

For PDF sources, use the page selector to limit the deck to a specific page range, handy when you only need one chapter of a long textbook.

Steps

Step 1, Pick your content. Use Library, Upload, Google Drive, or Prompt AI as above.

Step 2, Pick an AI model (optional). The picker shows a short Recommended Models list, with everything else under More Models. Paid plans automatically get the recommended model on your first deck. Standard Auto uses GPT 6 Luna. Free can browse the named models; selecting another model requires a paid plan. Use best model selects Claude Opus 5.5 at a two-credit base cost. Scholarly remembers the model you pick for AI Slides separately from your other tools, so your next deck starts on the same model instead of resetting to the recommended pick. Each one produces a different style and voice, see Choosing an AI Model for guidance.

Step 3, Add custom instructions (optional). Use the free-text instructions field to guide the slide content, style, and focus areas. For example: "Focus on chapters 3-5" or "Make it suitable for a 10-minute presentation."

Step 4, Generate. Click Generate and the AI begins creating your slides.

Generation Progress

Slides go through several stages:

1. Pending: Queued for processing.
2. Processing: The AI reads your PDFs, plans the slide structure, generates content and visuals, and assembles the deck. For PDFs, it uses extracted text to locate relevant pages, then reads those pages visually when needed so diagrams, equations, tables, and handwriting can inform the deck. The model also reviews its draft for layout and source accuracy, and edits slide wording before publication. Review the finished deck yourself before presenting, especially diagrams, numbers, and dense tables.
3. Completed: Ready to view and download.
4. Failed: Can be retried from the slides page.

You can track progress in real time from the notification bell in the header. Close the modal and keep working, you will be notified when the slides are ready.

Cancelling and Retrying

• Cancel: Stop an in-progress generation at any time.
• Retry: If generation fails, retry from the slides page without re-uploading your PDFs.

Deck Settings

Slides are built on the same scene pipeline as Standard video lectures, so a deck shares their visual kit and colour looks rather than picking from a list of named themes. The customise step offers:

• Pick a starting preset: Full Deck (the default), a complete lecture-style deck with section breaks and clear explanations, or Exam Prep, which focuses on likely testable concepts, comparisons, and summaries.
• Slides: One slider sets how many slides the deck has. Paid plans start at 15 and can choose anywhere from 5 to 30. Free decks are 10 slides; the slider stays locked and opens the upgrade options.
• Language: The language the deck is written in.
• Expert style: An optional expert deck style, such as Executive Assertion-Evidence, Visual Teaching Deck, or Minimalist Keynote. It stays on None until you pick one.
• AI model: See Step 2 above.
• Dark mode: Render every slide on a dark theme.
• Look: A colour look, a paper tone and accent pairing from the same set the Standard video lectures use. Left on Auto, every deck draws a fresh one.
• Custom instructions: Free-text guidance for content, style, and focus.

Dark mode and Look sit in the Settings card on desktop; on a phone the deck keeps the defaults: light slides and an Auto look. The same look controls appear for the podcast visual companion, so an episode's slides follow the look you chose for it. Existing decks are never changed retroactively; a look applies to the deck you're generating now.

You can also apply a Customisation Profile from Custom Instructions, its reusable guidance and visual references shape the deck on top of the look you pick.

Slide Kinds

Rather than turning everything into bullet points, AI Slides picks the shape that fits each moment: a title, a key idea, a definition, a comparison, a step-by-step process, a diagram, a headline statistic, an equation, a chart, a table, a timeline, a quote, a callout, an image, or a closing slide.

It can draw relationship diagrams, process flows, timelines, charts, equations, and icons in the deck's own colours, the same visual kit the Standard video lectures use.

The AI plans the deck and reviews its draft for fit, readability, and the requested slide kinds. Podcast companion slides use the same approach. Review the finished slides before presenting or sharing, especially charts, equations, and dense source material.

Slides View

Generated slide decks open in Slides View: a presentation-style layout with one large slide in the main area. Generated decks have no thumbnail sidebar: use the arrows to move between slides, or click the slide counter (for example 3 / 15) to open a grid and jump to any slide.

From Slides View, click the play button to enter full-screen presentation mode. Navigate with arrow keys, Page Up/Down, Space, or by clicking the left/right halves of the screen. Press Esc to exit. See the PDF guide for more details on Slides View and presentation mode.

Output

Generated slides are saved as PDFs. You can:

• View them in Slides View.
• Download the PDF on a paid plan.
• Export a separate copy: choose PowerPoint (.pptx) or Word (.docx) from Export, or save to Google Slides or Google Docs when Drive is connected. PowerPoint and Google Slides keep rendered slide visuals as images; text within those images is not individually editable. Word and Google Docs use extracted text you can edit. These exports require a paid plan and create a separate copy: editing it changes neither the Scholarly original nor its sharing settings. See Exporting Your Work.
• Edit the existing deck: use Refine or the side chat to request changes to a generated deck you own.
• Share with a link.
• Print from the viewer menu on a paid plan. Free decks remain viewable and shareable by link.

Limits

Free users can generate a slide deck with their shared lifetime AI Creation Credit. That free credit does not reset. Premium includes 15 AI Creation Credits each week, shared across slides and every other AI creation type, and Laureate includes 80.

Related

• Turn Notes or a PDF Into Slides: the step-by-step walkthrough from your notes to a finished deck, with slide counts and plan limits.
• Exporting Your Work, PowerPoint, Word, and Google Slides exports in full.
• Choosing an AI Model, each model writes a deck with a different voice.
• Customisation Profiles, reuse your brand and editorial rules across every deck.
• AI Infographics, when one page beats a whole deck.