Tome turns text prompts into full slide decks

Staring at a blank slide deck is easily one of the most frustrating parts of modern knowledge work.

Presentation platform Tome thinks it has the fix. On December 20, the startup announced built-in integrations with OpenAI’s GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, letting anyone generate an entire slide deck from a single text prompt in seconds.

Type in something like "a pitch deck for a flying-car startup," and the tool builds out a preliminary outline, writes copy for each slide, and generates accompanying images to match.

Tackling the blank canvas

Tome launched its beta back in March, initially focusing on a fast, flexible canvas for digital storytelling. But according to cofounder and CEO Keith Peiris, deck design was never the real bottleneck. The most laborious part of building a deck is crystalizing the narrative.

During a demo for Fast Company, Peiris had the software spin up that hypothetical flying-car pitch deck. While the resulting text was somewhat generic, it gave users an instant scaffold: problem statements, market context, and potential funding sources laid out in a logical sequence.

Interestingly, the tool is not just finding traction in corporate pitch rooms. Some employees at Tome have been using it to generate illustrated bedtime stories for their kids. In one live test, the AI whipped up a quick children’s tale about a witch and a butterfly saving a forest, complete with illustrations and a prompt-driven sequel.

Users can refine the AI illustrations with more specific prompts or swap them out for real product screenshots and data charts. Peiris noted that upcoming versions will support richer layouts, data tables, and business-tuned models that let users highlight text to summarize or expand.

Tome’s AI features are currently free to try in beta, though the company plans to introduce tiered usage credits and paid plans sometime next year.

Why it matters

We think Tome made a smart bet here by targeting the "blank page syndrome" rather than just pitching generative AI as a cosmetic toy.

For startup founders, solopreneurs, and product managers, this is definitely worth testing right now. You are not going to send an unedited Tome deck to an investor, but cutting the time it takes to build a rough first draft from two hours down to thirty seconds is a massive workflow win.

That said, the limitations are obvious. General-purpose models like GPT-3 tend to lean on business cliches, and DALL-E 2 images rarely fit serious corporate branding. Without real data integration and precision chart-building, these decks risk feeling like decorative fluff.

Tome also faces an incoming storm from legacy players. With Canva rolling out AI features and Microsoft looming large with Office integrations, a standalone presentation tool has to move ridiculously fast to keep users from simply waiting for their existing software to catch up.