As I mentioned in another post, I have switched to using Claude for most of my AI work. I decided to try something new, something I had never done before. I had a thirteen-page board report that I had prepared and shared with the board at the beginning of the month. I also have a presentation that I need to give early next month. I had an idea.
I thought, “Why not copy the text from my report, send it to Claude, and give it instructions to extract the major topics from my report and create slides that I can open in Keynote or iA Presenter?
Claude did a good job, but not an exceptional one. I suspect that if I’d provided a better prompt I would have received an even better result. I was able to do a bit of cleanup and then send it to my executive assistant to beautify and finalize.
This process took about fifteen minutes and probably saved me 1.5 hours of work.
Not too shabby.
This is the kind of work that I consider appropriate for AI: using my own material, summarizing it, consolidating it for another use, and then reformatting it as requested.
Google’s NoteBookLM (free, web version) will also generate slides/presentation from uploaded doc. I’ve tried it a few times and results were quite useful - as a draft, not final versions.
Copilot is actually best at this. Which is interesting since CoPliot is consistently the worst of the AIs I try, but the Office integration makes sense I suppose. As well as doing the bullet points and such, it will pull out matching images that suit the topic, and vary the format of each slide to stay interesting.
I’ve tried similar tasks with Claude but still run into subtle changes in my material that changes the meaning of my key points. It does get you 90% there but checking everything twice is still required for sure.
+1 on Google’s NotebookLM. I find the summary-via-podcast it creates a little too chirpy for my tastes, but the other things you can generate in the Studio pane—mind maps; flashcards; quizzes; and a bucket labelled “reports” that includes briefing docs, study guides, blog posts, position papers, editorial essays, concept explainers, debate outlines, and a roll-your-own option are useful starting points for crafting your own documents.
Another good feature: the content generated in the chat box is linked to its source in the documents you upload to make it straightforward to check the LLM’s work.
