Since its March beta launch, Tome has prided itself on letting users quickly build presentations and tell online stories with just a few clicks or taps.
As of today, the app will make it even easier for users to get started thanks to new AI tools that can help create presentations. By typing a description of the desired presentation subject into a text box (for example, a startup pitch deck or a product strategy proposal), users can harness built-in connections to AI tools GPT-3 and DALL-E 2 to generate what amounts to a preliminary outline and draft.
“We realized that Tome could be this really compelling partner to you to overcome writer’s block and to help craft a narrative,” says Tome cofounder and CEO Keith Peiris.
And while AI-generated material has recently become trendy (if somewhat controversial), with companies like Canva, Microsoft, and Shutterstock announcing autogeneration features, Peiris emphasizes the company aims to respond to customer feedback, not simply hop on the content bot bandwagon.
“When you ask someone what’s the most time-intensive and laborious part of telling a compelling story, the deck construction is a small part of it,” he says. “The much larger part is the crystallization of a narrative.”
Demonstrating the AI for Fast Company, Peiris had the software create a sample fundraising slide deck for a hypothetical flying-car company, complete with AI-generated images and text. And while the content was somewhat generic, Peiris says the tool is still valuable for people building presentations to essentially see which points they want to touch upon—say, problems to be solved and potential funding sources in the case of a startup’s pitch deck—and how they could organize the slides.
AI-generated illustrations can be customized by giving new, more specific prompts to the software or replaced with actual artist renderings or other images like charts. In future versions, Peiris says the software will create more complex layouts and recognize when people might want specific kinds of visual content beyond text and illustrations, including tables and graphs for numerical data.
The software, currently available in beta, isn’t just for business use: Some parents at the company have been using the tool to generate basic illustrated bedtime stories for their young children, which Peiris showcased in his demonstration. The resulting story, involving a witch and a butterfly teaming up to save an endangered forest, wasn’t exactly Dr. Seuss-caliber storytelling, but Tome took just a few seconds to generate text that a parent could tweak or augment with their own improvisations, along with illustrations that caregivers would be unlikely to draw themselves without time, training, and art supplies.
In response to further prompting from Peiris, the app quickly generated additional slides with a conclusion that paved the way to a sequel to the story. Future versions will likely use a more customized AI model trained on business use cases that will let users highlight a section of text and ask the AI to elaborate on or quickly summarize the content, Peiris says.
For now, the tool is free for anyone to try, but Tome is likely to introduce various free and paid plans with different amounts of AI use credit as of next year. Peiris says he anticipates AI will be useful in a wide variety of cases. In testing, even teams that frequently generate similar presentations, like monthly updates, have found the feature helpful in quickly prototyping, he says.
“Even though we know a lot of these narrative arcs are similar, we often forget them,” says Peiris.
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