I Tested the New Slides Tool in ChatGPT, and Here’s How It Compares to Gemini.
ChatGPT’s capabilities continue to rapidly expand, with the latest feature being a full-fledged slideshow creator. Announced a few weeks ago, ChatGPT Slides allows you to create PowerPoint-style presentations directly from your conversations, and is now available to Pro users and above (meaning you currently need to spend at least $100 per month to access it).
If you use the free ChatGPT plan or the $20/month Plus plan, you can still create downloadable PowerPoint files from your conversations. However, they will be simpler than those created in the full version of ChatGPT Slides and lack collaboration and editing features.
ChatGPT Slides is part of OpenAI’s strategy to provide users with a full-fledged office suite within ChatGPT apps. Pages (a word processor) is already available for Pro users and above, and a spreadsheet app is in development—the idea is that you’ll soon be able to do all your work without relying on Google or Microsoft.
While Chatgpt Slides is currently only available on premium plans, it will likely be available on cheaper subscriptions in the future. But for now, let’s compare this tool to what’s available on the free and Plus plans, not to mention Gemini’s capabilities in Google Slides . I’ve done some detailed research.
How ChatGPT handles presentations for free and paid users.
When testing AI tools, it’s helpful to focus on what you’re already good at so you can spot errors early. To test this, I decided to see what ChatGPT could glean from the internet about the new iPhone Duo. If you’re using the free or Plus plan, you can start a conversation and then request a slideshow or PowerPoint presentation on the topic.
Plus users also have access to a special “Showcase” feature, accessible via the “+” menu in the request window, though I have a feeling this feature has been in development since ChatGPT Slides was introduced. In any case, you can start by asking about the iPhone Duo’s specs and early online reviews, then say, “Create a slideshow for me about the key features and reviews so far.”
In response to my $20 order, I received a fairly high-quality slide deck about Apple’s foldable device, with accurate information, as far as I could tell, and a simple structure. It looked like it could have been quickly thrown together from a template, if you didn’t have the time to properly align all the points or carefully choose which details to include and which to omit. A nice bonus was that ChatGPT was able to add an official photo of the iPhone Duo to the beginning of the slide deck, but I had to specifically request it.
You can go back and make specific changes to the slideshow, but you’ll need to describe them in the general comments field—you can’t select individual slide elements and make more precise edits. However, if all you need is to occasionally transform your ChatGPT conversations into a simple slideshow, there’s no need to upgrade from the free or Plus version to the paid version at this time.
ChatGPT Slides is a nice upgrade.
After upgrading to a Pro account, I gave ChatGPT Slides a similar task, hoping for something more comprehensive. For starters, Slides has a separate area in the app where you can create a blank presentation from scratch. There are some basic features for images and text, but the idea is to use prompts to create your presentation. It’s like a very basic Google Slides with a prompt box.
Creating slideshows this way seems rather tedious: typing the text you want to say and then waiting for ChatGPT to do it isn’t as intuitive as simply adding graphics and text yourself, as you can in PowerPoint. Furthermore, judging by my testing, it’s a bit buggy: some requests don’t execute properly.
I find it much more useful to start a standard conversation in ChatGPT and then turn all the information into a presentation. My presentation on the iPhone Duo was longer, better structured, and more informative than the one I created on the Plus plan—this time it even included battery life graphs and official photos.
There is still a lack of presentation at all levels of ChatGPT.
However, regardless of whether I used the free, Plus, or Pro versions, my presentations didn’t feel well-designed. They didn’t transition smoothly between individual slides or between slides as a whole—it felt as if an algorithm, not a human, had determined the information to include and where to place it on the slides.
Whether you’re creating presentations in chats or through the ChatGPT Slides workspace, you can click on individual elements and perform basic manual resizing and positioning. You can also prompt edits with tooltips: “Add a picture of a cat,” “Make this more prominent,” “Center all this information,” and similar features.
ChatGPT Slides offers collaboration tools that I haven’t had a chance to test, but I can see how they could be useful for teams actively using the ChatGPT ecosystem. I can also imagine ChatGPT Slides being useful when you need to quickly present a large amount of information in a presentation that looks somewhat presentable.
Overall, I think I’d prefer to stick with the traditional slideshow creation method for now. These older methods are more precise and easy to manage, and they give you complete control over what’s displayed and where—even if it takes a little more time. Moreover, modern presentation tools offer a wealth of templates and other aids, making it easy to create something pleasing to the eye and incorporate all the necessary information.
ChatGPT Slides vs. Google Slides in Google AI Pro
Google, of course, is also seriously invested in artificial intelligence (and even more), and if you subscribe to Google AI Pro ($19.99 per month) or higher, Gemini can appear directly in Google Slides and help you create presentations. To compare the tools, I gave it the same task as ChatGPT—requesting a presentation on the new iPhone Duo.
During the process, Gemini asked several questions: what visual style to use, what audience to target the slideshow for, and what details to highlight. While such information could always be manually entered into the tooltip, it would be a useful addition to ChatGPT Slides.
The presentation, created using Gemini and Google Slides, impressed with its design and overall atmosphere: it felt like the slides had been prepared by a human, unlike the ChatGPT presentation, in terms of the selected information, slide layout, and color scheme.
However, Google’s result also had its flaws: the presentation contained errors in the iPhone Duo’s maximum screen brightness data, and the “iPhone Duo” graphic looked like two iPhones from 2021 had been glued together. ChatGPT Slides, at least, managed to obtain official images from Apple’s website.
Google Slides doesn’t allow you to attach individual editing hints to specific sections of a presentation, as you can in ChatGPT Slides—they must be specified in the general hint field. However, Google Slides is clearly a much more mature and established slideshow creation tool than its OpenAI counterpart, in terms of its features and layout capabilities (after all, it’s been around for ten years).
Given their additional software structure and lower cost, Gemini and Google Slides are currently the best options for AI-powered slideshow creation—though I wouldn’t rule out OpenAI catching up. For now, ChatGPT Slides is a useful feature if you’re already paying a premium for ChatGPT monthly, but it doesn’t justify replacing your commitment to AI.