A fast-growing startup just released a first-of-its-kind tool that can turn your documents into presentations — beating both Google and Microsoft to the punch.
The startup: In September 2022, San Francisco-based startup Tome launched a free product similar to Powerpoint, but with features that make it easier to create presentations on mobile and to add a range of visuals, from tweets to videos, into slides.
In December, Tome integrated generative AI — software trained to produce text, images, and other content on demand — into the product.
“We want to use AI to shape and aid in every part of the process.”
Keith Peiris
This gave users the ability to use research firm OpenAI’s GPT-3 model and DALL-E 2 tool to quickly and easily generate original text and images, respectively, for their presentations without leaving the Tome platform.
By February, the company had 1 million users — a rate of growth it claims makes it the fastest-growing productivity tool ever — and since then, its user base has grown to 3 million.
What’s new? Now, Tome has launched a new feature powered by GPT-4 — OpenAI’s smarter, safer, and more capable update to GPT-3.5 — that will turn a text-based document up to 25 pages long into a presentation, eliminating the need to create and format individual slides.
“It’s a push into work and enterprise use cases for us after all the demand we’ve seen,” CEO Keith Peiris told Reuters. “We want to use AI to shape and aid in every part of the process of taking an idea in your head and then translating it to a compelling story.”
The caveats: As is the case with other generative AI tools, users need to carefully check their Tome presentations for any statements that seem factual but aren’t — during a test, it reworded a document I uploaded in a way that introduced factual errors into the presentation.
Additionally, while it doesn’t cost anything to sign up for Tome right now, users start out with 500 credits that get depleted every time they generate text, images, or other content. Currently, the only way to get more credits is by referring others to the app.
Tome expects that to change soon, though — Peiris told Reuters the startup plans to launch a paid subscription in the coming weeks that will give users unlimited access for about $10 per month.
The big picture: Earlier in March, Google and Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, each announced that they were integrating generative AI-powered tools into their productivity apps.
The companies promised that these tools would help users quickly write documents, analyze spreadsheet data, and generate stunning presentations — eventually. The tech giants wanted to see what their “trusted testers” thought about the tools before widely releasing them.
“You can’t just weld AI onto the outside of a product.”
Reid Hoffman
Neither Google nor Microsoft have said what they expect to charge for these tools or when they expect to make them available to the general public, so for now, Tome is the only company giving people a way to seamlessly incorporate generative AI into their presentation-making.
When Big Tech does release its tools, it’ll do so to an audience far bigger than Tome’s — three billion people use Google Workspace, and nearly 350 million pay for Microsoft 365 subscriptions — but the Tome team is confident it’ll have the better product.
“When people would say you had to build mobile-only, or mobile-first, products to do mobile, I think the same is going to be true in AI,” Tome investor Reid Hoffman told Forbes. “You can’t just weld AI onto the outside of a product.”
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