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 Creator Studio to build presentations. So we're looking now at the latest version of Keynote, version 15.1. And 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. So 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 have 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 themes, you'll notice this little icon here at the top right corner for the premium ones, but all the rest don't have that and you can access them regardless. Let's use 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 powered 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 US. So I actually had to use AI to look that up and then generate this. So I've given 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 a 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 from 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's 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's a framework that I could start with. And 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's an image here on the right. Matter of fact, I could select all of these slides here and change them all to that. Now, the next thing you may want to do is add images and 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, and I can look for Apple, maybe Red Delicious like that, and it will come up with some things. Now, one problem with using clip art like this is it's going to be hard to find all 10 apples in some drawn or 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, is it really going to be able to find exact matches for those? So I could click here and insert this into this image here. And the reason it inserted it here is because I had to select it. If I didn't have it selected, it would have just put it as a new image. So instead, I'm going to use the AI generation tools, another part of Apple Creator Studio. With this selected, I'm going to go to this icon up here instead and generate an image. And now I can just scribe what I want. So I'm going to put a single Red Delicious apple with no other elements or background. And I'm going to set the aspect ratio to portrait 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. And I'm going to generate this image here. Now the advantage to using AI for this when I've got these 10 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 can have it match the style. So 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 I'll insert it there. And I've got my first slide. So the great thing is now I could go here and I can go to generate the image and I could 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, when I'm doing a serious presentation, I probably want to check that with some online references, even if I was grabbing from a clip art collection that specifically stated that this was a Granny Smith apple, I'd probably want to do that as well. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 3,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at MacMost.com slash Patreon. Now, another image tool you've got is the ability to alter images, and 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, but let's say I want to change it in some way, I can control click it and I can take generate from image. For instance, you can also go to the sidebar here, format image, and I can use generate from image and I could describe a change I want. I could say, for instance, give the person a hat. So there I go. I could say insert, and it will change it. Another image feature you've got that you can see here on the right is auto crop. So if you want to do better cropping, it will suggest some things here. So you could take one of these suggestions like that, and you could still work with it and adjust it even after the suggestion has been applied, and then you get cropping there. You also get super resolution. So if this image here is something you had, it may be 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 is 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 could 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 could use this button here at the bottom, or there's one on the toolbar there, and I could have it generate presenter notes for this slide. It puts a little text there, say that they're generated, check for accuracy, that kind of thing, but you could just get rid of that. And 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 the 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 like you 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. And 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 to 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 open AI servers to do so. And when you're using somebody else's service, usually there are limitations. And 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. And 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. Doesn't look like there's 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. 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