Ask HN: How useful is Gemini for Google Apps? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How useful is Gemini for Google Apps?

3 pointscobbzilla5 comments

I recently wrote a Google doc to describe a presentation. I used a Heading 1 style for each "Slide N: Description" section, and it was otherwise cleanly formatted.

Then I hit the magic Gemini button and asked (more or less) "Make me a Google Slides presentation based on this document"

Gemini (paraphrasing): "Oh, sorry, I can't create new documents in Google Drive".

OK, I create a new blank Google Slides document. I press the magic Gemini button. After some preamble prompt BS, I paste my "Slides" document content, and ask it to create me some slides.

Gemini (paraphrasing): "Oh, sorry, I can only work on one slide at a time".

WTF? I go to a different frontier LLM, I ask it to make me a PPTX file from my description (which I downloaded from Google docs as markdown). After a few minutes I have a nice PPTX file. I upload that to Google Drive and open it. Google converts it to Slides. NOW, finally, I have the joy of improving one slide at a time with Gemini.

Why does my workflow suck so bad here? There must be a better way! Please help me HN.

I'm also keen to hear what are some actual cool tricks that do work with Gemini and/or frustrations others have had. Let loose.

This was released the other day: https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/crea...

So it should work for you now.

I have a paid (lowest grade) Google workspace account and I recently gave Gemini a copy of a text agenda and asked it to pop out slides with references for me. I got back 11 slides with nice references to all the state laws relevant to the agenda topics and some graphics it found online too corresponding to the agenda topics.

Did you not ask it from the Gemini web interface? Did you try to use the one already built into Google slides? It looks like you already had slides open and used it's magic button... I didn't I went straight to the Gemini app online.

I don't use it but probably chatgpt and claude are better for this type of work

yeah that’s the “different frontier LLM” I mentioned.

Frontier LLMs are decent at making powerpoint files, but can I point it directly at gdrive and tell it write a slides doc? a slides doc I can open on the web, share, etc? maybe if I mount my gdrive locally with something like rclone?

something to try next, but why oh why does google have to make it so hard. This feels like dealing with Windows in the 80s/90s

As companies start to reign in token budgets, how many tokens it takes to do a task a certain way becomes relevant. While I have no doubt computer-use on both ChatGPT and Claude can drive the browser to http://slides.new and click around to create what you want that way, given that there are libraries to write pptx files directly, it seems generating PowerPoint and having it import them to gdoc would be a more efficient use of tokens.

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