Hi HN! Excited to share something my friend and I have been building over many weekends.

I'm a physicist turned software engineer; my buddy went from consulting to tech. We met at a college where the popular path after graduation was consulting or finance (over a decade ago) so we have a lot of friends in the space. We saw firsthand how much of a consultant/analyst's life is spent in PowerPoint: nudging boxes around, putting talking points into a visual format, “beautifying” slides…etc.

There were already AI presentation tools like Claude and Gamma, but the feedback we kept hearing was:

1. They don't handle importing and editing existing PowerPoint decks well. 2. They rely heavily on templates, so decks look repetitive or generic quickly. 3. They're great for web presentations, but less useful if your workflow ends in .pptx, because they're rarely 100% PowerPoint compatible.

Brightdeck is our attempt at an AI presentation maker/editor for people who still live in PowerPoint and need OOXML compatability. You can import a deck, ask it to add slides or make edits, and export back to PowerPoint. It also generates slides without fixed templates. Instead of picking from a few layouts, it constructs each slide directly: text boxes, shapes, images, icons, diagrams, charts etc.

Two technical challenges were much harder than expected, which is why it took us this long to launch.

The first was PowerPoint compatibility, which means digging deep into OOXML. Claude was quite helpful for parts of the spec, though it gets things wrong A LOT and needs verification, so we ended up printing out and reading the ISO manuals. Some parts aren't fully implemented yet: SmartArt in OOXML has near-infinite styling variations that are poorly defined (e.g., a flowchart can have children but the spec doesn’t define how those children are spaced, so you have to reverse engineer it), and right now we convert charts to images when rendering in PowerPoint. This is not ideal, but it preserves fidelity until we add full spec support.

The second was the canvas and multiplayer editing. We wanted realtime collaboration from day one because retrofitting it later is painful. We use a simplified CRDT-like approach for slide state and syncing. It works well for most object-level edits, but realtime text-box editing isn't fully reliable yet when multiple people edit the same text at the same time. In practice people rarely edit the same text box at the same moment, so we accepted that tradeoff.

We debated building a PowerPoint plugin instead of a web app, but ultimately decided against that because we want to have full control over the UI. It also makes it easier to build an MCP server on top, so users can generate decks in ChatGPT and Claude directly.

For the agentic architecture we picked LangGraph — the modularity makes components easier to test. We used Gemini and Qwen for generation.

For this launch, I used Brightdeck to summarize HN sentiment on a top post this week (Fable 5 release): https://app.brightdeck.ai/presentations/019eae69-bbff-739f-a.... I found the deck version quite entertaining. More examples (all one-shot, warts and all so you can see unfiltered what the product can do): https://brightdeck.ai/showcase/.

The results aren't perfect. Some images are less relevant than they should be. But we think the direction is promising, especially for workflows that need an actual .pptx at the end.

You can try it here: https://brightdeck.ai/. There is a generous free tier and no credit card is required. Mobile is supported but editing on mobile is quite limited at this time, so I would suggest using it on a computer.

My friend and I are longtime HN lurkers and have always wanted to do a Show HN together, so this launch is a special one for us. We'd love feedback, especially from people who've made a lot of decks, or worked with OOXML, collaborative canvases, or AI document generation.

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@dang, if possible please add this comment to the post itself. This is my first show hn so I didn't realize I had to include the Show HN text in the post title for my submission text to show. Thank you!

As someone who makes a LOT of slides (I worked in consulting for many years, most recently as a manager at McKinsey), I literally tried every single AI slide maker on the market and this is actually game-changing software for me and many of my peers.

To the best of my knowledge, Brightdeck is the only software on the market that allows you to use AI to make non-trivial edits to existing PowerPoints. In my case an edit could be changing the format of an existing slide, incorporating a "sticky noted" comment on a slide , or taking raw notes I have on a slide from my deck's storyline (aka. ghost deck) and creating a slide from that which doesn't look out of place from the rest of the deck. In fact, I think they might also be the only software that allows you to use AI to add similar-format slides to existing PowerPoints while keeping the same layout/colors scheme...etc.

I have tried a few other tools and want to share my observations:

Gamma: Very easy to use and beautifully crafted. However, doesn't work with my use cases at all. If you try to upload an existing PowerPoint into Gamma, it destroys all your formatting and basically turns your deck into some simplified Notion file. However, if you don't care about preserving formatting, they're actually a nice option.

Genspark: I don't actually know how this company got to $200M ARR. Probably not from slides. At one point they (or their affiliate) pitched my team very heavily.

Claude: Claude Design can't make edits, their PPT plugin messes up even pretty simple edits if you're using it on an existing deck. If you're giving it a fresh prompt + fresh deck it actually works decently well (but it's super slow, like 20 minutes to generate 5 slides).

ChatGPT: ChatGPT.com can't edit decks (I believe; haven’t tried in a while), and the decks they generate from scratch are pretty basic. Worse than Claude. Their plugin for PowerPoint can only edit text--it can't change design/formatting.

Figma Slides: You can't edit decks. New decks from scratch are kind of nifty and have cool design elements though.

So...my conclusion is that so far Brightdeck is the only AI I can use to edit client decks. And the only thing I can use if I want to add new slides to a client deck. Congrats to the team on officially launching on HN. I'll keep paying for it and telling my friends as long as you don't take this comment as an indication to raise the price on me :)

Disclaimer: I found the product early through a mutual acquaintance and became an early user. Although I wasn't asked to write this, you should take this with a grain of salt, since I have quite a positive outlook on the company, their pace of releasing new features, listening to feedback...etc. I've been looking for this exact product for a while now.