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 emphasize.

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 up top, with everything else under Other Models. Paid plans automatically get the recommended model on your first deck; choosing a specific model is a paid feature. 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. As part of this stage it also reviews every slide for overlaps, text cutoffs, and layout issues, and regenerates any slide that fails the check — so you get a clean deck without having to fix anything manually.
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.

Canceling 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.

Visual Themes

Every AI Slides deck is generated in a visual theme that sets the look of the whole presentation — typography, color palette, layout density, and how titles and bullets feel.

Themes available on every plan, including free:

• Editorial (default) — Warm, textbook-style layout with serif headlines. Best for training decks, internal briefings, and review sessions.
• Vibrant — Bold colors and confident typography. Great for pitch-style decks and decks you want to feel energetic.
• Freestyle — AI chooses the visual direction that best fits the material, then keeps the deck coherent.

Pick a theme from the customization step before you generate. Each theme reshapes the same content for a different audience — you can regenerate the deck in a new theme later without rewriting anything.

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

Colour looks and Dark Mode

Each generation also draws a colour look — a paper tone and accent pairing from the same set the Standard video lectures use. Left on Auto, every deck gets a fresh one, and the classic cream look remains the most common draw.

To choose deliberately, open More options in the create window:

• Look — pick a specific colour look instead of letting it draw one.
• Dark Mode — render every slide on a dark theme.

The same panel appears 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.

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 by default -- a presentation-style layout with a thumbnail sidebar on the left and one large slide in the main area. You can switch to the traditional scrolling PDF view at any time using the toggle above the document.

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 or the standard PDF viewer.
• Download the file.
• Export the deck as an editable file — a PowerPoint (.pptx) deck or a Word (.docx) document from the Export menu, or save it to Google Drive as Google Slides or a Google Doc when your Drive is connected. Editable exports need a paid plan, and an export creates a separate copy — editing it doesn't change the Scholarly original, and your original's sharing settings are untouched. Text arrives as real, editable text; slides built from generated imagery keep those visuals as images. See Exporting Your Work.
• Share with a link.
• Print directly from the viewer menu.

Limits

Free users can generate a slide deck with their shared lifetime AI Creation Credit. That free credit does not reset. Premium includes 10 AI Creation Credits each week, shared across slides and every other AI creation type, and Laureate includes 80.

Related

• Exporting Your Work — PowerPoint, Word, and Google Slides exports in full.
• Choosing an AI Model — each model writes a deck with a different voice.
• Customization Profiles — reuse your brand and editorial rules across every deck.
• AI Infographics — when one page beats a whole deck.