Introducing LetsGo Slides - A Better Way to Co-Create with AI

Parclay is pleased to share this announcement from LetsGo Labs. You can read the original on LinkedIn.

LetsGo Labs is thrilled to release LetsGo Slides for Google Slides this week. It’s an extension available in the Google Workplace Marketplace that transforms what you can do with slides. LetsGo Slides is great for work presentations, but you’ll quickly see how you can do so much more. You can brainstorm with AI, compile research, create original graphics and pictures, or even create a how-to guide. All from within the same application.

This product has been in development for several months. It’s still early, but it’s time to share it with the world and get your feedback. We hope you will give it a spin and let us know what you think. Every new account gets a free trial period, no subscription required, so go ahead and get LetsGo Slides.

As with all new technologies, there’s a backstory. What follows is the story of how we got here…

In the beginning…

When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, it brought the wow and wonder of technology. There was excitement about what this new AI technology would bring. It was inescapably fun to use a chatbot to help write emails, to concisely deliver answers to the most obscure questions you could think of, and to amaze your friends with all kinds of new facts you discovered during epic chatbot sessions.

Then came the chatbot burnout… the realization that it felt more like Web.Search.Next than a quantum leap in technology. How did this technology go from wonder and awe to something akin to using a customer support chatbot to cancel plane tickets in such short order?

Worse, it felt like the user had to surrender all of their originality and creativity because the AI would do the whole task for them. Technology headed to an automation extreme, cutting users out of the creative process altogether. When the AI missed the mark, you had no choice but to let it try again. There was no role for the user to play, resulting in bland, cookie-cutter content that had to be exported to another application for further iteration.

What these tools really lacked was context and means to foster user-driven originality. Context for what we were working on, context for who the audience was and the context of the user. The lack of context can be overcome if the tool engages the user for their insights and original thinking… but the tools out there didn’t even bother to try that.

The Perils of Prompt Engineering

Putting artificial intelligence in context is much more nuanced and complex. It involves a deeper understanding of:

• The user - their needs, expectations, and potential frustrations

• The broader audience – their demographics, interests, and existing knowledge.

• A clear grasp of the task itself - its purpose, desired outcome, and potential challenges (this helps ensure the communication is focused and impactful)

Some of this nuance and complexity is addressable with AI prompts. Giving AI direction on how you want it to respond including contextual information. The challenge then becomes about productivity and creativity. Writing prompts or prompt engineering is one of the many skills we have had to adjust to since the introduction of AI-driven chatbots. But it comes at a cost to creativity and productivity.

First, it puts the onus on the user to make up for the limits of the AI. And that takes a lot of time and energy. Once you finally figure out the perfect prompt to get what you want, you have to go back and forth, back and forth between AI chatbots and the documents and tools that you use everyday.

We had doubts. Are these new “workflows” really benefitting users? Insofar as AI can save us time, there’s obviously some benefit. But is it coming at the expense of our creativity? Is it degrading the overall quality and value of the things we create?

So, armed with experience working in the Office team at Microsoft, building add-ons and plug-ins and launching companies that delivered game changing software, we started experimenting and building.

We value automation if it can remove some of the drudgery and reduce the amount of time it takes to complete a task. But we don’t want AI in the way and we don’t want the voice of AI to drown user creativity. We want the experience and the output to feel like a collaboration with AI.

Building LetsGo Slides

First, we prioritized the interface. Bringing AI into the tools most of us use every single day. LetsGo Slides does not use a conversational interface - it simply allows you to access AI with a click of a button. This is complex - Powerpoint was released in 1987, Google Slides (originally called Google Presentations) in 2006. Both have had updates over the decades but it is a massively radical shift to integrate AI naturally and organically into the existing workflows of building slide presentations.

It’s far easier for both Microsoft and Google to drop in a chatbot experience for users - but it feels clunky and intrusive to use. It requires interface context switching within the same application. So, we focussed on providing a more natural experience, achieving a much deeper integration to bring users context directly from the slide they are working on and collaborating with Gemini to create content and visuals.

Then we focussed on empowering the user by directing the responses generated by Gemini. For example we created themes for presentations that would provide context for Gemini. One theme is a venture capital pitch deck for entrepreneurs. We have a wealth of experience producing successful pitch decks and as investors and advisors - seeing hundreds covering the spectrum from the best to the worst. How could we use that experience to guide both the user and the AI to generate a pitch deck?

We focussed on minimizing the drudgery of the presentation, giving the user a complete set of slides based on the text on their Title slide. Then the user can drill in deeper, add more content, and more slides. Add some images to support the text. And quickly keep tweaking the deck based on specific feedback.

The themes in LetsGo Slides are structured to prompt the AI on the parameters of the information to generate and the format to return it in. You don’t have to do prompt engineering when you’re trying to create a presentation. If you need a marketing plan theme, we have it. If you need humor, we have a theme for that. The text and images that the AI generates are not tied into the theme itself, but based on the text on the slides.

The bottom line is that you, the user, no longer need to design a prompt to get what you want out of the AI. The context of what you’re working on in Google Slides is more than sufficient.

Transforming Slide Presentations

After testing several early versions of the product, we realized that there were so many new ways we wanted to use a slide presentation. This is largely driven by the fact that LetsGo Slides does things differently from other AI tools for slide presentations. We allow the AI to help you create text and images, including real-time information from the Web. Most AI tools out there just give you a library of templates to make prettier slides, and the AI plays a limited role.

With LetsGo Slides, the AI plays as big of a role as the user wants, without ever forcing the user to do tedious prompt engineering. You just get to create. And creating is exactly what our earliest users did. From a “how-to” guide for training a puppy, to a research project on the top influencers in AI, and even a deck to pitch someone’s spouse on why they should let them buy an expensive acoustic guitar.

Better Together

We have grown accustomed to assessing software for what it does for us, rather than what we can do in concert with it. LetsGo Slides was built with a firm belief that collaboration with AI is more powerful than automation with AI. We think you’ll have a visceral experience of that concept when you try the product.

In future posts, we’ll share more details on the features of LetsGo Slides. We haven’t even mentioned support for over two dozen languages, speakers notes with citations, or the wonder of sticker and background images.

There’s so much more to cover. For now, we hope you’ll jump over to the Google Workplace Marketplace and install LetsGo Slides. As this is an initial release, we’re eager for feedback. Each signup gets enough free credits to build two or three presentations, and there’s no subscription required. You can reach us at [email protected] at any time, and we’d be so grateful to hear your thoughts.