Turn a PowerPoint deck into an audio show
Upload a PPTX to Lissin and get the deck as a narrated show. Why speaker notes decide whether it works, and how to brief someone who missed the meeting.
The short answer
Upload the .pptx and describe the show. Lissin reads slide text and speaker notes together, which matters more than anything else here: a deck is a set of headlines, and the argument connecting them usually lives only in the notes. A deck without notes narrates as a list.
How to do it
Check the speaker notes before you upload
Open the notes pane and look at what is actually there. If the notes are empty, the audio has only the slide titles and bullet fragments to work from, and the honest output is a two-minute outline. Twenty words of notes per slide changes the result completely.
Upload the .pptx, not an exported PDF
A PDF export of a deck flattens the notes away — you get the slides and nothing else. The .pptx keeps both layers, and Lissin uses them together.
Say who missed the meeting
The strongest prompt for a deck is a person: ‘brief someone who was not in the room and needs the decision and the reasoning, not the build-up’. Decks are performance scripts, and audio from one works best when it is rewritten for a listener rather than a room.
At a glance
- Format
- PPTX read natively, including speaker notes
- PDF export
- Works, but loses speaker notes
- Typical episode length
- 6–12 minutes from a 20-slide deck
- Transcript
- Included, synchronised to the audio
Hear what comes out
Shows already published on Lissin, free to play in the browser.
Questions
- Does it read the charts?
- It reads any text on or around them — titles, axis labels, callouts — but not the shape of the data. A slide whose point is the line going up needs that point written somewhere in text for the audio to carry it.
- Can I do a whole quarter of decks at once?
- Upload them together and ask for the through-line: ‘what changed across these four reviews’. That is a genuinely better episode than four separate readings, and it is the thing nobody has time to do by hand.
- Keynote or Google Slides?
- Export to PPTX from either. Keynote’s File → Export To → PowerPoint and Slides’ File → Download → Microsoft PowerPoint both preserve the notes.
What this does not do
Animations, build order and anything conveyed by layout are gone. Decks that are deliberately sparse — the good ones, often — give the least to work with, because their content was always the person talking.
Try it on something you already have
Upload a PDF, a deck or a document and describe the show you want from it. Or press play on anything in the library first — no account, no app.
Last reviewed 9 September 2026 by Lissin Editorial.