Slides to Video — PowerPoint or Keynote, Now a Narrated Lecture

How Slides to Video Works

PowerPoint's built-in "Export as Video" feature reads the slide text aloud in a robotic voice and produces something almost unwatchable. Scholarly's slides to video tool does the opposite: it reads each slide as a teacher would, writes new narration that explains what the bullet points are pointing at, and produces a video where you actually learn from the deck.

The AI parses every slide individually — title, body text, images, charts, code blocks, and embedded equations. If the deck has speaker notes, those are folded into the narration. The output keeps your original slide visuals on screen while a natural voice walks through what each slide actually means, slide by slide, in the same order you'd expect from a lecture.

Why Turn Slides Into Video?

Most slide decks were never meant to stand alone. A professor's lecture deck makes sense in the room, with the prof talking — but the deck by itself is just bullet points and an occasional diagram. When you're studying the same deck a week later, half of it is incomprehensible because the verbal explanation is gone. Slides-to-video reconstructs that missing explanation.

It's also useful for missed classes. If you couldn't attend lecture but the prof posted the slides, generating a narrated video gets you ~80% of what you missed without having to wait for a friend to share notes. And if you're the one giving a presentation, a narrated video of your own deck makes a great share-with-audience version of your talk.

Supported Deck Formats

PowerPoint (.pptx) is the primary format — every slide, layout, image, chart, embedded equation, and speaker note is parsed. Keynote (.key) files work after exporting to PowerPoint or PDF. Google Slides decks should be downloaded as .pptx or .pdf first. Slide PDFs work great — the AI handles them the same as a native deck. Even handout PDFs with multiple slides per page get parsed correctly.

Speaker notes (when present) substantially improve the output. If your professor included notes in their deck, the AI uses them as the authoritative source for what each slide is really about — so the narration matches what the lecturer intended, not just what's written on the slide.

From Slides to Flashcards to Exam

Once your deck is a video lecture inside Scholarly, the rest of the study loop is one click. Generate flashcards from the deck and the AI turns every definition, framework, and key concept into a question-and-answer card. Generate an exam and the AI writes multiple-choice and free-response questions that test the same material the slides cover.

That's the full slides-to-mastery pipeline: lecture deck → narrated video → flashcards → graded exam. For every set of slides your professor posts, you get a complete review workflow that takes a fraction of the time of rereading the deck.

Share With Your Class

Generated videos have a shareable link. Split a course's slide decks among your study group — each person converts one or two lectures, shares the Scholarly video, and the whole group ends up with narrated versions of every deck plus shared flashcards. It's the kind of asynchronous study workflow that used to require someone recording the prof in class.

Frequently Asked Questions