AI Slide Generator Tier List:
Great:
Claude[.]ai - most flexible, consistent formatting, pptx export. Requires some iterations (slight overlap in texts) but only one I would use for work. Great at adding data visualizations and diagrams as well. Allows upload of templates for company specific requirements. Requires good prompting to not get color slop (img 1 as example). Powerpoint export possible.
Good:
NotebookLM - makes absolutely beautiful slides (using nano banana pro), super consistent and great styling. Deep research integration is nice. Downsides: not editable, only PDF export, every page has a NotebookLM logo. Best zero shot slides for usecases that don't need branding. (img 2 as example)
Usable:
Gemini App - decent formatting, export to Google Sheets, only one that actually uses images which fit (eg architecture images from the arxiv paper directly). No diagram support, not very flexible (img 3)
Kimi - default templates, decent layout structure, no diagram support and random images. But powerpoint export so good enough for a starting point to fix it yourself. (img 4)
Meh:
Z[.]ai/GLM 4.6 - similar to Claude, but worse. Uses random images, slides are not consistent in length and width (which is a dealbreaker for me), but decent styling. Not exportable at all, basically just a website built in html.
Gamma - uses pre-built components, looks okay at best, slides not consistent in size, AI generated images everywhere, annoying pricing structure. Seems to be targeted at middle school students, probably fine for that.
Manus - model just not good enough to create high quality slides meaning weak content, slide sizes slightly inconsistent, powerpoint export at least but too many issues for manual fixing imo. (caveat I used Manus 1.5 Lite since I don't have the subscription)
Unusable:
minimax agent - did not even create slides for me, worked forever and created a markdown file in the end
Runnable - random page sizes, terrible AI image generated diagrams with unreadable text everywhere, unredeemable currently (uses Claude but the scaffold is bad)
@phill__1 whats your ranking now.
So, options as I see them are
NotebookLM,
Gemini App,
Gamma,
all the Chinese slide makers (Kimi, GLM, Mini),
Not sure if Anthropic can make slides