Assistive AI is all the rage these days. In the past few hours alone, we have witnessed AI summaries on YouTube, context-aware text generation capabilities in Google Sheets, Gemini tools on the cloud, the availability of additional AI models with smarter defaults in Visual Studio, and chat summarization on WhatsApp. Now, Microsoft has detailed an upcoming Copilot capability in PowerPoint.
Microsoft has outlined a streamlined approach to creating PowerPoint presentations within seconds using a PDF or text file, and a natural language prompt as input. Previously, you could just ground Word files for this purpose, so support for additional formats is certainly welcome.
In order to generate a slide deck using Copilot, you can simply open a PowerPoint presentation in the platform of your choice and click the Copilot button. In the resulting Copilot pane, select the "Create a presentation from a file" option, which allows you to type in the name of a PDF or text file stored on the cloud or browse for files in OneDrive or SharePoint manually using the "Attach cloud files" button. You can then refine your prompt by adding details about items that you"d like Copilot to focus on and click the "Send" button. This will generate the slide deck which you can rearrange or add more topics to, before you create the final version of the presentation.
Of course, this is a particularly useful feature in many scenarios including those which require you to create a slide deck based on some detailed documentation that you have already completed. That said, it"s obviously worth vetting any content that Copilot creates, since data inaccuracy is still a concern when it comes to AI models.
This feature is available to Insiders across PowerPoint for web, Windows, and Mac for the following versions:
- Windows: Version 2409 (Build 18025.20000) or later
- Mac: Version 16.88 (Build 24082514) or later
That said, you do need an Enterprise Copilot license in order to utilize the AI assistant in this way.