u/Obliviux

I built Pitchboost, a way to control Presentations hands-free

I built Pitchboost, a way to control Presentations hands-free

TL;DR: I built PitchBoost, an AR teleprompter for the Even G2 + Even Ring. Speaker notes on the lens, slide control on the ring, hands free. I built it for myself because I give a lot of talks.

Why I built it

I do a lot of stage talks, workshops, keynotes, internal pitches.

When I got the G2s I assumed the built-in Teleprompter would solve it. It almost did. The native one is really good for reading a script straight through, but for a real talk built around slides, it has a problem I'll get to in a second.

So I built PitchBoost as the missing piece. I keynoted a 3 hours workshop pitch in front of +50 people. Never looked at my laptop. Walked offstage and this is the most cyberpunk I've ever felt.

This post is honest notes from building and using it. Same vibe as my G2oom writeup.

The actual feeling: hands free, eyes free

The way I describe it to people who haven't tried it:

You wear normal-looking glasses. The Even Ring on your finger advances your slides — single click forward, double click back, scroll moves your notes if they're long. The notes for the slide currently on screen appear inside the lens. The audience sees a person standing centred, both hands free, eyes on them.

No clicker in your palm. No peeking at the laptop on the floor. No asking the AV tech for a confidence monitor. You just walk on stage and talk.

The first time I tried it during a real run-through, I knew exactly where I was every second, and the audience couldn't tell anything was unusual. I just sounded like someone who knew his content cold.

That's the actual point of this product. Everything below is in service of that experience.

The killer differentiator vs the native Teleprompter

The G2's built-in Teleprompter is solid for reading a script. To use it for a slide-based talk you have to:

  1. Copy your speaker notes out of PowerPoint
  2. Paste them into the Teleprompter app, manually split by slide
  3. Hope you advance your slides in sync with the script's scroll

PitchBoost handles all of that for you:

  • Drop your .pptx. That's it. Speaker notes are auto-extracted from the file, every PowerPoint slide already has a notes field, most people just don't realise it travels with the deck. No copy-paste, no manual split, no prep.
  • The notes on the lens are always for the slide the audience is currently seeing. When you click the ring, the notes update.
  • Drift correction. If a slide has a video that swallows your click, or a click-triggered animation that advances inside the slide instead of moving to the next one, the helper detects this within a second and snaps the lens back to the right notes. You never see "wrong notes" for more than a beat.

Zero prep. Just load, pair, present.

What you actually see on the lens, configurable to your style:

  • Speaker notes — if you've written notes for your slides, they show on the lens for whichever slide is currently up. Scroll with the ring if they're long.
  • Slide text — if you go off-the-cuff and don't write notes (I do this for half my talks), flip a toggle and the lens shows your slide's text instead — the same content the audience is reading, but in front of your eyes. Useful for not losing your place.
  • A small thumbnail of the slide on the right — optional, gives you visual context of where you are in the deck. Pick "current" (what the audience sees right now) or "next" (peek at what's coming while you finish the current point). Off by default; flip it on if you want it.
  • Preview of the next slide — scroll past the current notes (or slide text) and the next slide's content appears below, so you always know what's coming up. Helps you stick the transition without changing slide or breaking eye contact.

A bit about how it works

Three ways to run it, depending on what you use:

  • Desktop helper for PowerPoint on Mac and Windows
  • Chrome extension for Google Slides
  • Browser-only mode for corporate machines where IT blocks installers — simply open pitchboost.io/present, drop your file in

The hardest part wasn't the lens layout — that's a 576×288 monochrome display, same constraints as G2oom. It was making the round-trip from "ring click" to "right notes on the lens" feel instant. Everything in the chain — ring → BLE → phone → backend → PC → backend → phone → BLE → lens — has to complete as soon as possible. Otherwise you're standing on stage saying "and as you can see in this chart" while the lens still shows the previous slide's notes, and the illusion breaks.

I'll spare you the architecture diagram. The short version: real-time push instead of polling, and drift correction that verifies the host app's actual state on every click. A lot of edge cases you really don't want to hear about. (PowerPoint on Windows in particular has a quirk in corporate environments where two PowerPoints can coexist on the same machine. Solving that ate three weeks.)

Final thoughts

The G2 is the right form factor at the right time, and it's really perfect for productivity apps. Normal-looking glasses, a competent display, a ring you forget you're wearing, a phone-app SDK good enough to build real things on. I keep finding excuses to build for it.

If you have G2s and you give talks — pitches, workshops, conferences, internal demos, anything — PitchBoost might be the most fun you have this year.

You can find it on Even Hub, or you can have a look at pitchboost.io

Happy to answer questions in the comments. If you've used it on stage I'd love to hear how it went. If you're building something for the G2 yourself, even more so.

u/Obliviux — 6 days ago