u/Annette_Leon

i swear every new student productivity app now tries to do fifty different things at once instead of just helping you finish assignments faster, half of them throw dashboards, streak systems, and random gamification at you when all I need is something that helps me organize research and actually understand what I’m working on

i’ve been testing a few different tools this semester because my university workload got brutal around finals, some were decent for summaries but terrible for explanations, others sounded robotic enough, natural way compared to some of the bigger ai platforms

still curious what people here actually use though because I feel like everyone has completely different workflows now. Are people mostly using ai for brainstorming, research, editing, or just speeding through assignments at this point?

I swear, every time I have to make a presentation it turns into a full-day project for no reason.

Like I already know what I want to say I have notes, sometimes even a full outline but then I open PowerPoint or Google Slides and just get stuck. Instead of focusing on the actual content, I end up wasting hours on slide formatting, spacing, layouts, fonts, colors, all that stuff

And the worst part is even after all that time, the slides still look kinda generic. Like yeah, they’re “fine”, but there’s no real flow or storytelling, just blocks of text that don’t really connect.

At this point I feel like the biggest problem isn’t even design, it’s figuring out the structure and logical flow of the presentation. Like what goes on which slide, how to build it so it actually makes sense when you present it

Recently I tried switching things up and used an ai presentation tool that basically takes your raw notes and turns them into slides. Not just design, but actual structure (intro → problem idea conclusion), which honestly helped more than I expected.

What surprised me is that it also handled the design pretty well. Nothing crazy, but clean, readable, not those default template vibes. And the whole thing took just a few minutes to generate instead of me sitting there for hours overthinking everything.

Another thing that helped is when I didn’t have enough material, it could actually expand on the topic a bit and help with research, so I wasn’t stuck trying to find extra info for slides last minute

Still not 100% sure if I’d use it every time, but it definitely feels like a faster way to create presentations without losing your mind over every little detail

Curious how you all deal with this do you:

just stick to templates?

hire someone for important decks?

or use some kind of tools to speed up slide creation?

Because honestly, I feel like presentations take way too long for what they are

ok so I’m kinda stuck right now

uni is hitting all at once and I’ve got a part-time job and I’m just falling behind on essays

I keep seeing EduBirdie pop up here and there, but the opinions are all over the place. some people say it saved them, others say it’s not worth it at all

I’m not trying to just copy-paste someone else’s work, more like… get help with structure or fixing my draft so it doesn’t look like a mess

my main questions:

is it actually usable or just hype?

how’s the quality really?

and is it as expensive as people say or manageable if you don’t go crazy with it

would be nice to hear from someone who actually used it, not just guessing