Swings, Not Slides

Slides were made for the stage. On stage, a talk is linear: slide one, slide two, slide three. A work meeting is nothing like that. You’re talking with the room, and it goes all over the place. Someone jumps ahead, someone circles back, someone asks for slide 20. It’s more like a swing, going back and forth, and the questions are the whole point. Otherwise, the meeting could have been an email.

So can an interface that thinks help slides keep up with the room? I tried it in a Mac app called Swings. You present your deck in a window you share on the call, and a tray docked underneath, which only you can see, listens to the conversation. It opens PDF, PowerPoint and Keynote files, and Google Slides and Gamma links.

The tray has three modes.

• Simple Tray. Thumbnails of every slide, so you can privately find the right one, and beside them the slide to show next. When someone says “let’s get to the pricing slide,” it’s already there, one key press away, and you stay in the moment with your audience.
• Pivots. People don’t always ask for a slide. They say things like “I think a big brand is more trustworthy.” Pivots suggests the different turns you could take from what the room seems to be thinking, each with a short title written for what was just said. You could answer with the slide about being a local service, or the one about being a family business. It’s like having a colleague in the back of the room who’s really good at reading people.
• Conversation Driven. The controversial one. What if there were no order at all? The presentation opens on a slide written for your deck, with the topics it covers. When someone asks “are you eco-friendly?”, a new slide answers the question, with the deck’s real slides that cover it underneath, so you can click through to go deeper. For the first time, the visuals keep up with the conversation as it happens.

AI isn’t presenting for you. You stay the presenter, and unless you turn on Auto-jump, nothing changes on screen until you choose it. Swings is more like the best-prepared person in the room, helping you with what to say.

Do any of these work? I don’t know. Try it yourself.

Swings is a free Mac app. There’s no account and no sign in: download it, open a deck, and start presenting. Everything runs on your Mac: speech is recognized on the device, and Apple Intelligence’s on-device model writes the pivot titles and the answer slides, so nothing is recorded or sent to the cloud.

Download Swings for Mac ↗ Slides that adapt to the conversation

This is a very early alpha, so there will be bugs! Share your feedback and tell me what breaks or what you’d want next.