Show HN: Perfect your presentation with a panel of AI reviewers

[ellenfkh]

Hi HN!

We (Thorntale) are a startup building presentation tools, we noticed that while people disliked the tedium of making slide decks, a lot of people actively dread presenting those decks, especially if it's a high-stakes call or if they're inexperienced. Speaking from experience, practice helps a lot, but it can feel embarrassing to give the same pitch to your friend or cofounder for the tenth time.

We built this prototype https://review.thorntale.com/ as a way to practice; upload a PDF deck, give your presentation, and the selected AI "personas" will analyze the slides and transcript and provide feedback. At the moment, we've tuned "personas" to give you feedback from the perspective of an investor, a teacher, or a marketing/branding lead (as well as a few entertaining extras.) If you have a particular use case, shoot us a comment, we're refining the persona system and planning what else to build there.

The tool is totally free and doesn't require signup or login; we'd love any feedback if you check it out!

https://review.thorntale.com/

[scrollaway]

Question to you folks, do you have any luck with ai tools that are able to generate clean PPT based designs (or some other non-PPT tool that can generate clean PDFs)?

Like, with Claude Code I can generate a bunch of web pages based on a core design and components. But doing consistent presentations is very difficult unless you have a super simple template.

[ellenfkh]

Our main tool (app.thorntale.com) is this concept! But yeah, the problem we've noticed is that without a lot of constraints, the generated presentations look very disjointed and tend to be incoherent.

My theory is that while Claude and similar can generate html-based documents fine, presentation slides are such an unconstrained medium that it's closer to image generation than code generation, so getting it to have a stable style is much more difficult. We constrained our app to a Notion-like architecture for this reason.

[scrollaway]

Send me an email, would love to chat.

[0914730732674]

Marp (Markdown Presentation) works well for me:

https://marp.app/

https://github.com/marp-team/awesome-marp

And outlining is easier than in Powerpoint, even if one doesn't use an LLM.

[scrollaway]

Looks very cool! Are there UI tools that work with it though or is it all text based?

[esafak]

I'd just upload my presentation to my AI tool myself, forget about the personas, and describe the intended audience instead.

If the value proposition is in the personas, I do not see it. On a related note, presentation quality is hard to gauge, so such a tool may be hard for you to monetize. Prospects may wonder if is it any better than just doing what I suggested, and by enough to pay for?

[ellenfkh]

It's definitely the next step -- adding the ability to tune the intended audience and (for instance) give them your specific context. The personas are a shortcut for more generic feedback, for if you don't know your audience very well, or for kicking the tires.