Your first deck needs no AI key: how OpenSlides reads your notes
OpenSlides can write a deck’s outline with your own AI model, but it does not need one. With no key, the studio reads the headings and bullets in your notes and turns them into slides by fixed rules. The same notes give the same outline every time, so you can write notes that come out the way you want.
Start from a brief
In the studio, File → New deck from a brief asks for a few things: what the deck is for, who it is for, the messages they should leave with, how many slides (4 to 20), and a tone. Paste your notes underneath, or load a .md or .txt file. A .pptx template or a logo is optional. If you want to see it work first, Use the Northwind example fills in a fictional company’s board review.
One heading, one slide
Each heading in your notes becomes a slide, and a # heading at the top becomes the deck’s title. A short line with no full stop, followed by bullets, counts as a heading too. Notes written without Markdown still split into sections, and so does text copied from a web page.
What sits under a heading decides what kind of slide it becomes:
- A chart — three or more bullets written as “Label: number”, such as “Europe: 42”.
- A timeline — bullets that start with a date: “July:”, “Q3:”, “2027:”, “Phase 2:”.
- A big number, or a row of up to four figures — bullets that mostly carry a figure.
- A quote — a line starting with
>, or a quoted sentence followed by “— Name, Role”. - A comparison — two or three
###groups of bullets under one heading, side by side. - An agenda — a heading such as “Agenda” or “Overview” with bullets under it.
- A closing slide — a last heading such as “Next steps”, “Questions” or “Decisions”.
- A list — any other bullets, or numbered steps when the bullets are numbered or the heading says “how”, “steps” or “process”.
The studio then adds a title slide, an agenda when there are five or more content slides and room for one, and a closing slide if your notes have none. When the notes hold more sections than the slide count allows, the least specific slides go first: plain statements and lists before numbers, charts and quotes. Your first section always stays.
Your words are not thrown away. Each slide’s speaker notes are the text of the section it came from. The presenter view shows them, and narration reads them as the slide’s script.
Check the plan, then pick a look
Nothing is drawn yet. The outline opens as a list, one row per slide: drag to reorder, change a slide’s role, edit its text, add or remove slides.
The same outline is then drawn four ways. Which four depends on the tone you chose; a .pptx template or a logo becomes one of them. You can refine a look in a sentence, up to three times. Without a model the sentence is read by its words: “warmer”, “darker”, “less motion”, “serif”, “rounder” or a hex colour each change one thing, and words it does not know change nothing. The looks are worked out the same way every time, so the preview you pick is what the build produces.
What a key adds
Add a key for Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter, or point the studio at a local model in Ollama or LM Studio. That model then writes the brief and the outline, and reads your refinement sentences. After the build, the agent edits the deck with the same operations you use, so every change it makes is one undo.
The key is kept in your browser. Requests go from your tab straight to the provider you chose, never through us, and a local model never leaves your computer.
Why it works this way
The studio is free, needs no account and uploads nothing. Building without a model keeps the first deck the same: it costs nothing and sends nothing anywhere. The rules are also something you can learn. Put three lines like “Europe: 42” under a heading and you know you will get a chart.
Open the studio and start a deck from your own notes, or read how the rest of it works.