I’m building out a class presentation in Google Slides and am wondering if I can use Google Gemini to create my slides? Gemini is Google’s generative AI system and I’m definitely a fan!
Presentations are a natural place where generative AI would be quite useful. There are four areas it could help us create better presentations, faster: theme creation, individual graphic creation, slide production, and slide proofreading and validation. Unfortunately, as of summer 2024, only two of these are supported in Google Slides: slide production and graphic creation. I expect that you can go directly to Gemini and have it produce presentation outlines that can then be imported into Slides, but in terms of easy, integrated capabilities, we’re at two of four.
Of course, with the breakneck speed that all of this GenAI software is evolving, it’s possible that these new features – or even more innovative ones – will be released tomorrow!
Shortcuts: Adding Graphics | Applying a Theme | AI Generated Content
Let’s stick with what we have available today, however. To start, make sure you’ve enabled “Labs” to ensure that the Gemini-powered features show up in Slides (off the Tools menu). Now, let’s explore…
ADDING AI GENERATED GRAPHICS TO A SLIDE
For our first step, let’s open up a new slide presentation in Google Slides:
On my system, the Gemini sidebar shows up automatically. You might need to click on the “diamond” graphic on the top right to reveal it. Notice in the above that I’ve asked it to create “an ultra-modern glass and steel university”. Rather than just my prompt, however, I can also specify a style for the graphic:
I’ll choose “Cyberpunk” and see what it produces.
You can see the images on the lower right. Not exactly what I was thinking about: I could click on “View more” to have additional choices. For this tutorial, let’s just proceed… A click on an image and it appears on the blank slide. A few judicious text box resizes to compensate and we’re left with this:
A good start, but quite austere. Let’s pick a theme. Unfortunately, you can’t just describe the theme you’d like, so we’ll have to choose from the rather dull catalog of built-in Slides themes.
CHOOSING A THEME FROM GOOGLE SLIDES
This is done by choosing “Change theme” from the “Slide” menu:
The Gemini sidebar is replaced by a set of potential themes. Scroll down to see the full set:
Momentum isn’t too bad, though it might be a bit difficult to read when projected onto a screen due to its low contrast. A click on “Momentum” applies it:
… and a few seconds of data entry gives us an opening slide that’s ready to go:
As a best practice, I encourage you to add some small print acknowledging that the image is AI generated. I believe htat’ll become the norm, but for now, it’s just a good practice to help people interrupting your presentation to ask questions like “where is that?”.
WHAT ABOUT CREATING NEW SLIDES WITH AI?
With that basic design, you can see it’s a breeze to create slides, pick themes, and add AI-generated images. What about the actual content of the slides, however? For that, go to an individual slide by clicking “+” to add a new slide. Click on the Gemini “star” icon on the top right and a new side panel appears:
This time I’ve typed in “create a slide that summarizes ten reasons higher education must reinvent itself for the 21st century”. Can it manage to fulfill my request? Well, kinda sorta…
Gemini has kept the title, but notice that it’s offering up five, not ten, reasons, and that it added the image without any further prompting. Not a fan of the image, but the reasons listed are an interesting starting point for my further development of this presentation.
Don’t like what it produced? You can click “Retry” from the little pop-up Gemini toolbar. Do like it? Click “Insert” to add it as a new slide in your presentation. Then remember to choose Slide > Apply Layout to have it match your other slides.
As is clear, though, you must proof-read anything created because Gemini is not great at this and will unquestionably get things wrong. I asked for ten reasons, it gave me that as the slide headline, but then listed five. That’d be embarrassing if I was in front of a room of professionals and making a presentation.
Other AI systems might do a better job of content creation too: ChatGPT did really well with “create a ten slide presentation exploring the future of higher education for the 21st century”, suggesting that the key themes would be technological advancement, personalized learning, globalization, alternative credentials, challenges and concerns, and future trends.
Either way, Gemini’s ready to help you as it can in Google Slides. Enjoy!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Google’s office suite and tools since the very beginning. Please check out my extensive Google Help Library for lots of useful tutorials while you’re here. Thanks!