Like many people in the technology industry, I’m regularly tasked with creating and delivering presentations – it’s something I really enjoy – spreading the message of cloud to the world. One of the things I don’t especially enjoy however is the design process around presentations – luckily I have a great person who handles those parts of my life (thanks Adrian!) and this helps. But I’m always interested when people come to me with suggestions about how I can automate the more manual parts of my life. Case in point recently when I was approached by Israeli company VisualBee, wanting to brief me about their software that automates the creation of PowerPoint presentations. I was intrigued having spent time looking at the different PowerPoint animation and template offerings out there and, frankly, ending up disappointed.
There are two general approaches towards the “improving presentations” theme – the first is that taken by companies like Prezi and SlideRocket who seek to move people away from PowerPoint onto more creative and flexible applications. The second approach is to accept that PowerPoint is the de-facto standard and build a tool that uses it, but to better effect. This is what VisualBee has done, creating a PowerPoint plugin to add animation, images, transitions and general creative bling to presentations.
So… How does it perform?
Sadly (if you’re not a creative person) you simply can’t automate the creative process. I’m happy spending good money with my designer because he has the skills and abilities to create something beautiful from, frankly, something humdrum. I ran a test on VisualBee, updating one of my own presentations 9that I created myself I must add). These two presentations, uploaded to SlideShare, are embedded below. The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating.
I hasten to add that I didn’t do any post creation editing of the VisualBee file – which from one perspective might seem a little unfair – but the entire value proposition of VisualBee is the ability to automate the presentation creation process – post-process editing seems to fly in the face of that.
So the bottom line is that you simply cannot automate creativity. VisualBee is a nice plugin and all but I’m going to continue using real live humans to do the creative stuff for me.
(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog – SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)
Ouch, it’s worse than I thought at first reading. They just slam in colorful images, totally ignoring rules of readability, and actually hiding the message on some slides. Don’t have to go further than your Agenda – slide #2 for proof.
Dear Ben,
My name is Arie Livshin and I am the CTO of VisualBee. Thank you for your article.
I would like to address several topics which were raised in the review:
First, regarding Zoli’s remark – you are absolutely correct! The “Electric” Style Ben chose had a bug which made the text appear directly on the colorful background. We have fixed this immediately after reading the article. Thanks Ben and Zoli
Ben, you are right – a robot cannot completely replace a graphic designer (or a composer, or a writer). What VisualBee does, is to considerably shorten the creative process while making it much more fun. Therefore, the “Preview” screen (which appears after the initial Enhancement process is complete) is one of our great features – it allows you to easily modify the automatic results, e.g., choose different pictures, backgrounds and layouts, to suit your taste as well as make corrections.
While it is difficult for VisualBee to compete with a talented graphic-designer, we offer good results extremely cheaper. You can use VisualBee for free, or buy a yearly premium account (i.e., more designs and extra features) for the price of a single slide designed by a graphic-designer!
VisualBee currently has over thirty thousand active users and receives good responses from many happy customers.
Thanks again,
Arie A. Livshin
CTO, VisualBee
I’m definitely not sold on VisualBee. If you strip it all down, it’s simply just an add-on. I don’t know if I can even call it a plug-in.
Creating presentations is a pain in the butt but it’s one that a presenter makes with the audience in mind. The creation process is based on the target audience. I don’t know if a software can automate this.
Dear Amelia,
My name is Arie Livshin and I am the CTO of VisualBee. Thank you for your feedback.
You are correct that a presentation designer should have the target audience in mind. Therefore, we let the user select an appropriate Style from the style gallery before a presentation is being automatically Enhanced. You can select quiet and conservative themes as well as colorful and more “crazy” ones. After the enhancement process is complete, VisualBee lets you select among several relevant pictures for each slide to suit your taste and audience. You can also choose appropriate transitions or suppress animation effects.
I am not sure what you meant by the difference between an “Add-On” and a “Plug-in”, but I would like to note that VisualBee is not “*just* an add-on” as you write. It is complex software, with several patent-pending algorithms. It has been in development for over 3 years and is still being constantly improved.
For example, VisualBee analyzes the presentation text and structure and suggests relevant images to each slide according to its content. Being a researcher myself (I have a PhD summa cum-laude in Computer-Science), I can testify that this was not a simple thing for us to develop.
Cheers,
Arie A. Livshin,
CTO, VisualBee