JOE FERNANDEZ: In this video, we'll
explore how you can build an AI powered tool to help
you make better presentations.
Let's go.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey, folks.
Welcome to "Build with Google AI,"
where we explore how you can build practical solutions
with Google AI technology.
Slide presentations are a great tool for communication.
A picture really can be worth a thousand words
when you're trying to get an idea across.
And a slide deck is a great way to organize your thoughts
on what you want to say and how you want to say it.
Of course, most of us are not perfect at building
presentations and could use a little help.
So one of my colleagues on the Google Workspace team
thought we could apply AI to this problem
and created an AI powered slide reviewer
to help you get your message pitch perfect.
It's a great solution for those of us
who occasionally wait to hear the last minute to prepare
for our--
I'm sorry, what?
They want the slides when?
I'll be right back.
[TONE]
Woo, OK.
Here's a quick demo of the Slides Advisor project.
[AUDIO LOGO]
The project runs as an add-on for Google Slides
and uses the Gemini Pro Vision model
to review your presentation against a set of guidelines.
Once you've loaded the project add-on,
you can select it from the right side toolbar.
To run a review, select a slide and click the Evaluate slide
button.
Behind the scenes, the add-on takes a snapshot
and sends an image of the slide and review instructions
to the Gemini Pro Vision model.
The review results show up in the sidebar.
So you can refer to them as you update your presentation.
The cool thing about this project
is that you can change how the Gemini model evaluates
your slides based on guidelines you define.
I'll get to that a little later in the video,
but right now, let's talk to the builder of Slides Advisor.
[AUDIO LOGO]
All right, I'm joined today by the key developer for Slides
Advisor project and a member of the Google Workspace Developer
Relations team, Steven Bazyl.
Steve is coming to us from Boulder, Colorado Thanks
for being part of this.
STEVEN BAZYL: Hi, Joe.
Thanks for having me.
Happy to be here.
JOE FERNANDEZ: So this project started out as an experiment
that I was working on.
And then you actually took it in and built it out the add-on.
But my question is this, was it worth it?
Is AI actually going to help you build better presentations?
STEVEN BAZYL: It really was.
Honestly I was a little skeptical at first,
but once I started playing around with it
and building the add-on, I found that the AI model
was surprisingly capable at giving
useful feedback on slides.
And it didn't require a huge amount of effort
in terms of prompt engineering or playing
around with the input.
Definitely learned a lot as part of the process.
A few things that come to mind that I think
are really interesting and worth sharing are,
let's see, there was the limitation on the input
in terms of number of images.
The original idea was sort of just throw
everything in one big prompt and analyze
the entire presentation.
But practically, that doesn't work.
So it required thinking about how to approach it a little bit
and breaking up the problem into doing it on a slide
by slide basis.
And it turned out that actually gave better results than trying
to do it all in one big bite.
And that is just, I think, a general lesson
with working with these models, that they all
have some limitation on the amount of input.
So it does require thinking about how to approach problems
before you kind of get too deep into the weeds of building
things.
But it's a really powerful tool.
And a few other things--
I found playing with the creativity setting
or rather the temperature really helped being a little--
too conservative tend to give the same answers over and over.
But giving it a little bit more room to vary the response
made it feel a little bit more interactive.
And likewise, with the examples.
I remember playing with--
giving an example of the output.
And it sort overfit a little bit too much.
But once I gave it a little bit more room to vary the response
and didn't overprompt it, the results
were kind of mind-boggling that it
was able to take all this data and give reasonable results.
And the final thing and the fun part of all this
is really just the experimentation of it.
Once the pieces are put together,
there's just so much room to play around
with the prompts and different strategies.
And I had a blast doing it.
JOE FERNANDEZ: OK, so next question.
How does Slide Advisor actually work?
STEVEN BAZYL: So the advisor is built as a Google Workspace
add-on in Apps Script, which I just
chose because it's a really easy way
to get started with add-ons, and very approachable for anyone
who knows JavaScript.
Underneath the covers, what it does is, for any slide
that you're evaluating, it uses the slides API
to grab the thumbnail and the speaker notes.
And then it combines that with a prompt.
And that prompt basically just gives it
the guidelines for what type of information it's checking.
Right now, just a pretty standard guideline
on what to look for in slides.
And once it gets the result back,
renders it in the sidebar of slides,
and hopefully it is useful information.
JOE FERNANDEZ: OK, so next question.
If I want to extend Slide Advisor,
how do I actually go do that?
STEVEN BAZYL: So the code is going to be on the GitHub.
And really, the place I would start
for anyone who wants to play around with this
is look at the prompting.
That's the thing that really controls
the behavior of it the most.
So again, the things I put in there
were pretty basic guidelines about what to look for.
But that might not be right for you or for your organization.
So if you have your own standards about what
makes a good slide or a good presentation
or different rules you want to enforce,
just changing the prompt text will go a long way
in customizing it for your needs.
JOE FERNANDEZ: OK.
So from what you've explained, you haven't really
built a brand new AI model.
You're just using an existing one.
So does this really count as AI development?
STEVEN BAZYL: Oh, absolutely.
I mean, yeah sure, I'm not training
my own model or anything like that or doing fine tuning.
But it is applied AI.
And it's putting that model to work in, I think,
a really interesting way.
And if I take a step back and think about,
OK, if I had to approach this problem
just using traditional programming techniques,
I'm not even sure how I would do that.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's definitely
in the category of impractical and probably too hard
to want me to want to go do it.
But I think that that's kind of the reason why
this is so interesting, especially
for people like myself.
I've been programming for a long time.
I'm more familiar with traditional programming
techniques.
But this opens up so many new possibilities that I just
wouldn't have even thought were possible before.
And this idea of being able to take some image and some text
and just a description of the questions I want answered
and have it work, without really having to do a lot,
is just incredibly powerful.
There's so many more use cases I want to explore with this.
And really happy to have done this
and have a new tool that I can use for tackling problems.
JOE FERNANDEZ: All right.
Well, thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for building the Slides Advisor
and for telling us about it today.
[AUDIO LOGO]
It's coding time.
Let's look at how you can extend Slide Advisor's AI powered
review features.
Don't worry about taking notes, there's
a detailed tutorial linked in the description.
Slides Advisor is a Google Apps script project
with a few components, including the main execution functions,
user interface, code for getting the slide information,
and the code for prompting the Gemini model.
You'll need to set up access to the Gemini model,
and I'll cover that in detail in the written tutorial.
This AIG as a code file contains the review instructions that
guide the AI model in evaluating the slide
and providing feedback.
You can modify how the Gemini model evaluates the slide
by changing these instructions.
For example, the output I'd like the score
to be on the same line as the category heading, so let's
change that.
Show the score next to the category heading.
I also think this category heading should
be called message instead.
So let's change that too.
Further down, you can set some more parameters
for how the model operates.
This temperature value lets you set
how much variation the model is allowed in its response.
You can set this value higher to get more creative responses.
But we'll just leave it at 0.1 for now.
Once you've completed these changes, save the code file
and then reload the Google Slides page
to refresh the add-on.
Now let's rerun the evaluation and check out the result.
You can make these guidelines a lot more detailed
as long as you don't exceed the size limit of the prompt.
In general though, start simple and see
what results you can get with the minimum amount of input.
If you want to experiment with different prompts,
Google AI Studio is a handy tool for prototyping apps
with Gemini models.
We use it to test the first versions of this project.
So check that out.
All right.
Let's wrap this up.
[AUDIO LOGO]
And that's all the time I have to tell you about this AI
powered Slides Advisor project.
Thanks to my guest Steven Bazyl from the Google Workspace
Developer Relations team.
Links to the code project and a detailed tutorial
on how to extend Slides Advisor are in the description.
If you get some new functionality working,
let us know in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out the Google Workspace Developers'
YouTube channel for more information about building
with Google Workspace.
Link below.
Thanks for watching.
I really hope this video helps you build your own AI powered
presentation reviewer for your organization, and helps you
and your team be more effective communicators.
So keep learning, keep building, make something great.
We'll see you again soon.
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