Using Apple Creator Studio To Build Keynote Presentations

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at the latest version of Keynote and use Apple's Creator Studio to build presentations. 

We're looking now at the latest version of Keynote, version 15.1. I've got an Apple Creator Studio subscription so we've got access to some new tools here in Keynote. Let's use those to build a presentation. 

First, let's look at some new themes. You've got the same Theme Chooser as before and most of the templates are ones you had before and still have even if you don't have an Apple Creator Studio subscription. But there are some new ones under Premium. If you select Premium here on the left you can see only the premium ones. If you look at all All Themes you will notice this little icon here at the top right corner for premium ones. But all the rest don't have that and you can access them regardless. 

Let's choose a premium theme here. I'm going to go to Education here and let's use this University Classic one. So, I've got my new Keynote document here and I can just create it as before. But a new feature is the ability to generate slides using AI. You've got the tool for that right here in the Toolbar. Generate Slides From Text. You can also go to Slide and Generate Slides from Text. So let's use that here. It will bring up this dialogue with two text fields. So you have to work with this to figure out what information it really wants. For instance here I've got a quick little one sentence overview and then a description of what I want. You can see at the bottom it says Power By Open AI and that this is still beta. If I hit generate here what I'm going to get back is this message saying it couldn't generate the slides. I can try again. This time I'm going to provide more of a list here. It seems in my experiments to really want a list so it knows which slides to generate. Which is unfortunate because in this example here I don't know which apples are the most popular ones in the U.S. So I actually had to use AI to look that up and then generate this. So I've given it a little bit more information but most importantly a list of the apples, in this case, so it knows which slides to create. 

So you can't have it generate something from scratch all the time. You got to provide it with some sort of framework. However, you can use AI to do that. Even in here, for instance, I could simply control click, right click, or two-finger click, Show Writing Tools, and then I can use Compose and then do an AI prompt asking for a list of slides for a presentation and so on. So it probably doesn't work as smoothly as it could but with this it should generate the slides. Let's watch it work here. So, you can see it generated this first slide here. I can actually look at the slides as it's generating it. Here's an agenda. Here's each individual apple and it's adding each one in in the order that I provided them. So it's building a presentation here from scratch. It's not a complete presentation. I don't have images or anything like that, but at least it is a framework that I can start with. 

Then now, of course, I can go in and Edit any of these. This is all editable here. So I can change this to something else, like that, if I want. I can even change the slide layout. So, for instance, I can click here in the right sidebar and select something else. Like, for instance, let's just do Title, Text, and Image. So there is an image here on the right. As a matter of fact I can select all of these slides here and change them all to that. 

Now the next thing you may want to do is add images. You would think that maybe the new Content Hub would be a good way to do this. I can click here to access Content Hub, which is another part of Apple Creator Studio. I can look for apple, maybe red delicious, like that. It will come up with some things. Now one problem with using ClipArt like this is it's going to be hard to find all ten apples in some drawn and photographed style. Plus it's also going to be hard to be accurate. Like these may be red delicious apples but when I get down to looking, say, at Fuji and HoneyCrisp it is really going to be able to find exact matches for those. So I could click here and insert this into this image here. The reason it inserted it here is because I had this selected. If I didn't have this selected it would have just put it as a new image. 

So instead I'm going to use the AI Generation tool, another part of Apple Creator Studio. With this selected I'm going to go to this icon up here instead and generate an image. Now I can just describe what I want. So I'm going to put a single red delicious apple with no other elements or background. I'm going to set the aspect ratio to Portraits since this is a little taller than normal. The Photo Style to Realistic and the View I'm just going to leave at the default. I'm going to generate this image here. 

Now the advantage to using AI for this when I've gotten these ten different apples to generate is that it should be able to look at the information in its large language model and figure out what makes a red delicious apple look different than others. What makes a Granny Smith look different than others and hopefully provide me with some accurate images. Plus I could have it max the styles so that every apple looks like the previous apple. Just a single apple by itself with no background. Other presentation ideas may work better with the Content Hub images or may work better if you simply import images from somewhere else or some other AI image generation system. 

So here I have my picture and it looks good. I can describe edits if it didn't do something right like maybe there were two here or there was, you know, a farm in the background or something. I could have asked for changes. But I'm just going to insert this and it will insert it there and I've got my first slide. So the great thing is that now I can go here and I go to generate the image and I can type the same thing except substitute Gala instead of red delicious and get an apple that matches that, but it's the same style. So I've done it for the first five slides here. So hopefully it's got it right. Of course if I'm doing a serious presentation I probably want to check that with some online references even if I was grabbing from a clipart collection that specifically stated that the was a Granny Smith apple. I'd probably want to do that as well. 

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Now another image tool you've got is the ability to Alter Images. These can come from Content Studio or from your own images. So, if I search here for apple tree and let's say I want this image here. Let's say I want to change it in some way. I can control click it, and I can say Generate from Image for instance. You can also go to the sidebar here Format Image, and I can use Generate From Image and I can describe a change I want. So, I can say, for instance, give the person a hat. So there I go. I can say insert and it will change it. Another image feature you've that you can see here on the right is AutoCrop. So if you want to do better cropping it will suggest some things here. So you can take one of these suggestions, like that, and you can still work with it and adjust it even after the suggestion has bee applied. Then you get cropping there. 

You also get super resolution. So if this image here is something you had that maybe you've zoomed into a part of it and the resolution is not high enough. It doesn't look quite as good. You can basically sharpen the image using AI by clicking that button and letting it do its thing. The resolution of this image was pretty high to begin with so you're not going to see too much of a change.

Now Keynote 15.1 with Apple Creator Studio also has the ability to use AI to generate presenter notes. Now when you create a presentation like this it actually does that for you already. So, like for instance, for this first slide here if I turn On Show Presenter Notes you can see it actually generated the presenter notes there for each slide. But, say if there wasn't presenter notes for this, it was empty, I can use this button here at the bottom, or there is one in the Toolbar there, and I can have it generate presenter notes for this slide. It puts a little text there to say they are generated, checked for accuracy, that kind of thing. But you can just get rid of that. Then it gives you these notes here. A lot of times they're just repeating what's on the slide, which I don't think is helpful. But then it does, sometimes, give a little bit more information. This is especially useful if you're creating a presentation and you don't know much about the subject yourself. So you can kind of learn from the notes here. 

But if you're creating a presentation on your own you probably know a lot more already about the subject. That's why you're presenting on it. So then having notes generated for you doesn't quite make sense. Although it could make sense if you're creating the presentation but somebody else has to deliver it. 

Now another AI feature that you get with Apple Creator Studio is the Cleanup Feature. So you've got the button for it right here. Fix Styling and Formatting on this Slide. So, like if you start with something like this and maybe you accidentally have moved things around a little bit, like that, you can click here and it will clean it up. However, it doesn't work you would think it might. For instance, I intentionally created this diagram here with different size boxes, different fonts in them, nothing is aligning with anything else. If I say clean it up it says No Fixes at this time. Here's one that's a little more intentional. I have these all nicely lined up but I misaligned them now and it also says No Fixes at this time. But anytime you're actually using a slide template it seems like it will just snap everything back into the template. I haven't gotten it to work or do anything else really. I guess if you're kind of sloppy when taking a template and then changing things that maybe this will help. 

Now for all the stuff that I showed that was actually generating images or changes to images, of course, that's using OpenAI servers to do so and when you're using somebody else's service usually there are limitations. In this case if you look at Apple Support document here you see under Intelligence Features, there are usage limits. They're not strictly defined. So it says here at minimum per month you can generate 50 images, generate 50 presentations, generate presenter notes for 700 slides. Usage limits reset each month. So I'm guessing 50 is the minimum and depending how hard the image is to generate or if you're generating some more variations or if you've got more or less slides, the limits are going to be slightly different for you. But you can check where you are with those limits. 

In Keynote you can go to the Keynote Menu here and this is in Pages and Numbers as well. You can go to Intelligence Features and you can Show Usage Status. You can see here I'm already at 47% for my limit for February. So if you make an occasional presentation, generate a few images, you should be fine. But if you happen to work a lot generating presentations using images in them, then probably Apple Creator Studio isn't going to cut it for you. You're going to want to use one of the other AI services where you can actually go beyond your limit by paying more. It doesn't look like there is a way to do that with Apple Creator Studio.

So that's a look at the Apple Creator Studio tools in Keynote and how to use them to make presentations. Also with images we looked at Auto Cropping and Super Resolution. Looked at generating presenter notes and using the cleanup tool. There's actually a pretty full set of tools that you get with Apple Creator Studio inside of Keynote but none of them are really critical for creating presentations. You could do all of them without Apple Creator Studio. Some by just doing a little more work on your part, and some by using third party stock image or AI image generation tools. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.