Tech companies of all sizes are using recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence to launch a steady stream of new products, targeting the automation of mundane tasks traditionally performed by office workers and content creators.
These tools tackle a wide range of jobs, including drafting marketing content, scouring financial documents, note-taking during meetings, creating storyboards, interview preparation, and much more.
Seattle startup Plus Docs is getting in on the action with the release of its own AI tool that drafts slide deck outlines out of natural language prompts. It’s part of a rush of companies releasing their own slide deck generators.
The company’s core software product lets users capture “snapshots” of data dashboards. It’s similar to a screenshot, but snapshots regularly update. For example, a company could capture a snapshot of their customer-relationship management dashboard, showcasing metrics like email newsletter open rates.
The idea to launch a slide deck generator came from an insight that users struggle to find a place to use their Plus Doc snapshots, said Daniel Li, who co-founded the company in 2021 after leaving Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group.
Plus AI helps users create slide deck outlines for presentations like quarterly business reviews or team meetings. Li gave GeekWire access to the Google Slides extension. Here’s how it works:
- After opening the PlusDocs extension, users input a natural language description of the content they want in the slide deck. They also provide the context of the presentation, such as a deep dive, class project, or quarterly business report. For example, I inputted a “deep-dive on the ice cream market and business opportunity in Hawaii.” (I helped run an ice cream business in Hawaii.)
- The tool spit out an outline of a presentation, providing titles for each slide. This lets users review the format before the complete deck is generated, Li said. In the case of the Hawaii ice cream presentation, the outline included slides about the market, demographics, competition, trends, costs and budgets, and overall analysis.
- After confirming the outline was up to my standards, I chose a theme, then the tool generated a complete presentation in about a minute.
The AI-generated slide decks should serve as a starting point, not a finished presentation, Li said. AI tools are prone to hallucinate, or generate false information, meaning users need to fact-check the data.
The insights provided by the AI tool produced some inaccuracies. For instance, tourist activity in Hawaii actually picks up in the winter months, not decreases. The tool also uses photos sourced from stock image services, which can lead to concerns about usage.
“We don’t really think AI gets you 100% of the way there,” Li said.
In the presentation, Plus offered tips on how to refine and enhance each slide. For instance, in the business opportunity analysis slide, it said: “Consider conducting a SWOT analysis to assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of opening an ice cream shop in Hawaii.” Li said these tips can be helpful in pointing users in the right direction for research.
There are a number of companies creating their own AI slide deck generators including Microsoft’s Copilot, Canva’s Magic Design, Ghostwriter, Tome, Pitch, and Gamma.
“Where we have a different angle is we have all of your data from across all these different tools,” Li said. “And we can also plug that into the deck that you want to build on Google Slides; the report that you want to write in Notion; or the update that you want to write in Slack.”
Plus AI is priced at $10 a month. Li co-founded the company with Chloe Qi, a former colleague at Boston Consulting Group who previously worked at Bay Area startup Webflow. The startup raised $5.5 million in 2021.
