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 Three-Tab Picker

The Create AI Slides window opens to a three-tab layout so you can pick 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. Up to 3 files per deck.
• Prompt -- Skip files entirely and just describe the topic, like "Krebs cycle for AP Biology" or "Intro to data structures for CS 101."

You can mix tabs in a single deck — for example, pick two PDFs from your library and add a custom prompt to guide what to emphasize.

Steps

Step 1 -- Pick your content. Use Library, Upload, or Prompt as above.

Step 2 -- Pick an AI model (optional). Choose which AI model generates your slides. Each one produces a different style and voice -- experiment to find your favorite. See Choosing an AI Model for guidance on which to pick.

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.
3. Visual Review -- Every slide is rendered as an image and automatically checked for overlaps, text cutoffs, and layout issues. Cards that fail the check are regenerated so you get a clean deck without having to fix anything manually.
4. Completed -- Ready to view and download.
5. 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 class presentations, lecture decks, and study reviews.
• Vibrant — Bold colors and confident typography. Great for pitch-style decks and decks you want to feel energetic.
• Minimal Mono — Quiet, monochrome layouts that get out of the way of the content. Great for technical material and dense diagrams.
• Pitch — Cover-style cards with strong title slides and section breaks. Best for proposal-style and "explain this to a room" decks.

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.

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.
• Share with a link.

Limits

Free users can generate slide decks with their shared daily AI creation limit. Ultimate gets unlimited daily AI creations for slides and everything else.