Inspiration

Anyone who has created presentations for different stakeholders knows the struggle: the same product must be explained differently to engineers, marketers, executives, and customer success teams. This often results in multiple versions of the same slide deck, duplicated effort, and inconsistent messaging. We wanted to solve this by allowing presenters to create one presentation that could adapt to any audience, making knowledge more accessible without increasing preparation time.

What it does

Prestral transforms a standard PowerPoint presentation into an interactive AI-powered presentation. Users upload their presentation along with supporting documents such as specifications or architecture notes. Viewers can then hover over any piece of text to receive AI-generated explanations that expand on the content. Using a complexity slider, explanations automatically adapt from simple business-focused summaries to detailed technical insights, allowing the same presentation to effectively communicate with multiple audiences.

How we built it

We built the frontend using React and TypeScript, providing an interactive presentation viewer with slide navigation, hover interactions, and an audience complexity slider.

The backend was developed using FastAPI (Python). It processes uploaded PowerPoint files, extracts slide layouts and text positions, converts slides into images, and combines them with uploaded context documents. We used Mistral AI to generate audience-aware explanations based on both the presentation content and supporting documentation.

Challenges we ran into

One of our biggest challenges was preserving the original appearance of PowerPoint slides while making every text element interactive. We solved this by rendering each slide as an image and recreating invisible interactive regions over the original text locations.

Another challenge was ensuring AI-generated explanations added meaningful context instead of simply repeating what was already written on the slide. This required carefully designing prompts and using supporting documentation to provide richer responses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Built a working end-to-end prototype that converts PowerPoint presentations into interactive AI-powered presentations.
Successfully adapted explanations for different audiences using a single presentation.
Maintained the original slide design while adding seamless hover interactions.
Created a solution that has practical applications for product managers, solution architects, marketers, engineers, and customer-facing teams.

What we learned

Throughout the project, we learned that the biggest challenge in presentations isn't creating slides—it's communicating effectively with different audiences. We also gained valuable experience integrating AI into a real-world workflow, processing PowerPoint files programmatically, and designing prompts that generate contextual, audience-aware explanations rather than generic summaries.

What's next for Prestral

Our next goal is to make Prestral even more intelligent and collaborative. We plan to support additional presentation formats such as Google Slides and PDFs, improve explanation quality using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), enable real-time collaboration through Google Drive integration, and allow users to ask follow-up questions directly from the presentation. We also aim to expand beyond desktop by developing a mobile-friendly experience and adding analytics to help presenters understand which concepts their audience found most challenging.