New DALL-E integration adds generative AI for next-level slides

For Tome, which calls itself the “new storytelling format for work and important ideas,” integrating OpenAI’s DALL-E into its flexible, interactive slide options — which it announced today — was a natural fit to add a generative AI dimension to decks. When OpenAI announced the release of the DALL-E API in early November, the San-Francisco-based startup had its chance.

“Making that a part of the storytelling creation experience just felt really natural,” Tome CEO Keith Peiris told VentureBeat. “It felt so much more powerful than looking for a stock photo or clip art — it’s kind of giving us a first look at what generative storytelling can look like.” 

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Tome, which was founded by Peiris and Henri Liriani, who were former Instagram and Facebook product leads, has raised $38 million in an effort to modernize the old-school PowerPoint. Its offering, which is meant to allow users to create slide decks in minutes, not hours, provides responsive design options that are fluid and quickly adapt to whatever is added.

“I’ve never had an idea that fits perfectly into a 16 by 9 rectangle,” said Peiris.

DALL-E is ‘step one’ to add generative dimension

That said, Peiris said so far Tome’s use cases go far beyond slide decks to include design portfolios, microsites, product reviews and feature articles. 

Tome already has a variety of other integrations, including with Figma, Airtable, Framer, Looker and Giphy. But the DALL-E integration, he explained, is considered step one in an effort to open up a “whole new dimension” of visual storytelling. 

“We talked to a lot of founders and storytellers using Tome and they said often the hardest part of building a slide deck is coming up with a visual,” Peiris said. “One of the powerful things about DALL-E is that it’s really precise – we’ve found that for most of our users, within a couple of tries they can get something that helps land their point.” 

Plans for text summarization using GPT-3

And, he added, DALL-E is just the beginning of adding generative AI dimension to Tome. 

“We’re working with GPT-3 and the next feature we’re going to be putting out in the coming weeks will be text summarization,” he said. “The reason we’re so excited about it is we’ve found so many folks write out paragraphs and then you need to convert it and summarize it and sharpen it into bullets.” 

Overall, Peiris said that today, “telling substantial stories requires multiple modes – data, video, text, images and tables.” That makes it challenging to tell a compelling story about an idea. 

“Where AI is right now, it just really reduces the barrier to doing so,” he said. “I think we’re sort of moving into this Renaissance period of being able to express ideas and thoughts in a multimodal way.” 

Tome is now available to the general public, and can be accessed via desktop or Tome’s iOS app.