AI Deck Generation

Transform your notes, documents, and outlines into structured presentations using AI.

Overview

Deckyard’s AI transforms your existing content - notes, documents, outlines, or articles - into structured presentations. Rather than generating content from scratch, AI analyzes what you provide and organizes it into logical slides with appropriate formatting.

Features

Content Transformation - Turn notes, documents, or articles into slides
Smart Structuring - AI identifies logical sections and key points
Outline Expansion - Convert bullet points into properly formatted slides
Slide Type Selection - AI chooses appropriate slide types for your content

Getting Started

In the presentation list, click New. The New presentation dialog offers four ways in:

Option	What it does
Blank	An empty deck
From the library	Start from reusable slides
From content (badged AI)	Paste text, upload a file, or pull in a Notion page
Import	A `.deck` bundle, JSON, or Markdown, without AI

From content is the AI path. It has three sub-tabs:

Paste text - paste your notes, article or document text; the button reads Generate
Upload file - .pptx, .pdf, .docx, .rtf or .odt; the button reads Convert
Notion - a page from your Notion workspace; the button reads Import. This tab only appears once Notion is connected on the instance.

Before generating, you can set two things in the dialog: the theme and the language. Your theme choice wins over any the model suggests, and the language picker only appears when the instance has more than one deck language switched on.

What Happens While It Runs

Generation is a single request. A progress dialog titled Generating presentation shows a percentage and a running commentary, and there is no cancel button: once you click Generate, the deck is going to be created.

Behind that progress bar the server works in two passes:

Outline. The AI reads your content and divides it into sections, marking each as body content or as structure (a chapter break, a pull quote, a closing slide). Structural slides are assigned their type in code, not by the model.
Content. Each section is written out in batches, and this is where slide types are chosen. The progress messages switch from generic to real here (“Wrote section 3 of 8”).

A title slide is added automatically, using the one your theme specifies.

There is no outline step you can edit. The outline exists inside that one request; you do not see it, reorder it, or change a slide’s type before generation. All editing happens on the finished deck.

Reviewing the Result

When generation finishes, the deck opens in the editor with a review layer over it. For each slide you see why the AI chose that slide type, and you get three moves:

Try as {type} - swap a slide to an alternative type the AI also considered
Adjust section - select several slides, describe what should change, and have that stretch rewritten
Discard deck - throw the whole thing away and delete the presentation

After that it is an ordinary deck: edit any slide by hand.

Prompts and Best Practices

Understanding AI’s Role

Deckyard’s AI is designed to reorganize, structure, and format your existing content into slides, not to generate content from scratch. Think of it as a skilled assistant that takes your notes, drafts, or documents and transforms them into a well-organized presentation.

What AI does:

Separates your content into logical sections
Identifies key points and structures them as slides
Selects appropriate slide types for different content
Formats text for presentation (bullet points, headers, etc.)

What AI should NOT do:

Invent information you didn’t provide
Add facts, statistics, or claims not in your source material
Fill in gaps with generic content

Why This Matters

When you give an AI a vague topic instead of actual content, it will generate generic, potentially inaccurate information. LLMs are prone to “filling in the blanks” when given insufficient input. By providing your actual content, you ensure the presentation reflects your knowledge, your data, and your message.

Ineffective Prompts (Avoid These)

These prompts ask AI to generate content, which leads to generic or fabricated information:

“A 10-slide presentation about sustainable energy”

“A professional presentation for executives about Q4 financial results. Include revenue highlights, key achievements, challenges faced, and 2025 outlook.”

“An educational presentation for high school students explaining how machine learning works.”

The problem: you’re asking the AI to make things up. It doesn’t know your Q4 results, your company’s achievements, or what specific examples you want to use.

Effective Prompts (Do This Instead)

Provide your actual content and let AI structure it:

From meeting notes:

“Turn these notes into a presentation:

Q4 revenue was €2.3M, up 15% from Q3. Main drivers were the enterprise segment (+40%) and new APAC clients. We closed 12 new accounts including Acme Corp and GlobalTech. Challenges: supply chain delays cost us €200K, and we lost two key engineers. For 2025 we’re targeting €10M revenue, launching the mobile app in Q2, and expanding the sales team to 8 people.”

From a blog post or article:

“Convert this article into slides for a conference talk:

[paste your full article text here]”

From research notes:

“Structure these research findings as a presentation:

Study conducted Jan-March 2025 with 500 participants. Key finding: users who received personalized onboarding completed 3x more tasks in the first week. Secondary findings: email reminders increased retention by 22%, but push notifications had no significant effect. Methodology: A/B test across three cohorts…”

From bullet points:

“Organize these points into a cohesive presentation:

Our product reduces energy costs by 30%

Case study: Factory X saved €50K annually

Three-step implementation process

ROI typically seen within 6 months

Currently used by 200+ companies

Integration with existing systems takes 2 weeks”

Tips for Best Results

Provide complete content - The more information you give, the better the result
Include your data - Actual numbers, names, and facts you want in the presentation
Specify structure preferences - “Start with the problem, then solution, then results”
Mention your audience - “This is for technical stakeholders” helps with tone and detail level
Review carefully - Always verify that AI hasn’t added information you didn’t provide

Since you cannot steer the outline afterwards, the source text is the only place where structure is decided. Saying “three sections, then a conclusion” in your input is how you get it.

How Slide Types Are Chosen

The AI is shown a catalog of the slide types your workspace actually has, with each type’s purpose and content schema. It picks from that catalog.

Two things follow from this:

Disabling slide types shapes AI output. Types switched off for your organization are withheld from the catalog, so the AI will not produce them.
Custom slide types are offered too, on the same footing as the built-in ones.

The catalog nudges the AI towards plain content types unless a specialized one genuinely fits, and away from using the same type several slides in a row.

Adding Slides to an Existing Deck

You can also let AI extend a deck you are already working on. In the editor’s slide-type picker, choose Add with AI… to open the AI: add slides dialog:

AI: add slides dialog with an LLM vendor dropdown, a free-text field with example prompts, and Cancel and Generate and add buttons

Describe what you want added; the AI also sees the existing deck and tries to fit in. Ask for a photo or image and you get an existing background image as a placeholder, which you replace afterwards. This dialog is also where you pick which LLM vendor to use, which the deck-generation flow does not offer.

What comes back arrives as a Review AI slides batch, where you can Discard, Adjust (describe what should change and regenerate), or Add {count} slides to accept them.

Changing a Slide with AI

Two more AI actions live on the individual slide, and neither is a full regeneration:

Refine - at the bottom of the slide inspector, describe a change in plain language (“make this punchier”, “split this slide”). It applies immediately, with an Undo in the toast.
AI Convert… - in the slide’s … menu, convert a slide to a different type and let AI rewrite the content to fit. Only some slide types have AI conversion targets, so the submenu may be short or absent.

Import and Convert

From Documents

The Upload file sub-tab accepts .pptx, .pdf, .docx, .rtf and .odt. The file is parsed to text and then goes through the same two-pass AI pipeline as pasted content, so the result is a Deckyard deck with Deckyard slide types, not a slide-for-slide copy of the original.

To import a deck without AI rewriting it, use the Import option in the new-presentation dialog instead: .deck, JSON and Markdown go in as they are.

From Notion

The Notion sub-tab imports a page and runs it through the same pipeline. It only appears when Notion is connected on the instance.

See Notion Integration for details.

Limitations

What AI Does Well

Identifying logical structure in your content
Breaking content into appropriate slide-sized chunks
Selecting the right slide type for different content
Formatting text for presentation clarity
Maintaining consistent tone throughout

What AI May Struggle With

Very technical or specialized content may need manual adjustment
Complex hierarchical information might need restructuring
Content with many interconnected references
Highly visual concepts that need specific imagery

What It Does Not Do

No outline you can edit before generating - structure comes from your input text
No cancelling a generation run once it starts
No length or duration setting - the number of slides follows from your content
No per-slide regeneration - use Refine or AI Convert… instead
No vendor choice on this path; the instance default is used

Always Review

Even when working from your own content, AI output should be reviewed:

Verify AI hasn’t added information you didn’t provide
Check that key points weren’t omitted
Ensure the structure matches your intended flow
Adjust slide types if AI made suboptimal choices