speaker is live · free · last verified 9 Nov 2026 · viability monitor
speaker
Speaker generates grounded, pause-aware speaker notes for a real .pptx deck, paced to your actual time slot.
If the argument lives in your charts, tables and screenshots, Speaker's evidence chain is the difference between notes that sound plausible and notes that are actually about the slide. The v0.8 pacing model fixes what made AI scripts unusable in a live room: length. MIT-licensed and fully local, with setup as the only real tax.
Verdict generatedVerified 5d ago · liveness 68/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/speaker
- Academics and lecturers scripting decks full of charts, SmartArt, tables and text inside images
- Researchers who need every spoken sentence traceable to something visible on the slide
- Conference and training presenters against a hard time slot who keep overrunning
- Developers and technical users comfortable running Python scripts from a terminal
- Non-technical presenters who want a plug-and-play GUI instead of a skill install
- Anyone needing real-time collaboration or shared editing of speaker notes
- One-off talks where Python setup and a review pass cost more than writing notes by hand
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Skip Speaker if you want a click-to-generate GUI and have no Codex or Claude Code client or Python environment — the skill is free, but the setup-plus-review pass only pays off on decks you will present more than once.
Speaker costs nothing: the speaker-v8.skill package is free under MIT, with no seat count, usage meter or plan upgrade. That puts it well below paid GUI note generators and dedicated AI presentation tools, and its only real cost is your time — a Python/Codex setup session and one review pass per deck. Budget that time, not dollars, when comparing it to a subscription you would pay on for a single conference talk.
In short
speaker — Speaker generates grounded, pause-aware speaker notes for a real .pptx deck, paced to your actual time slot. Best for Academics and lecturers scripting decks full of charts, SmartArt, tables and text inside images, Researchers who need every spoken sentence traceable to something visible on the slide, Conference and training presenters against a hard time slot who keep overrunning. Free to use.
What is speaker?
speaker — Speaker generates grounded, pause-aware speaker notes for a real .pptx deck, paced to your actual time slot. Best for Academics and lecturers scripting decks full of charts, SmartArt, tables and text inside images, Researchers who need every spoken sentence traceable to something visible on the slide, Conference and training presenters against a hard time slot who keep overrunning. Free to use.
Speaker is an open-source Codex skill (package `speaker-v8.skill`, internal name `ppt-speech-writer`) that reads a real .pptx file and writes speaker notes anchored to what is visibly on each slide — charts, tables, SmartArt, screenshots, labels inside images. It suits academics, lecturers, researchers and conference speakers who present from dense decks and want a script that names what the audience is looking at rather than paraphrasing bullets. A Claude Code skill path ships in the repo, and notes are tuned per slide in both Chinese and English. The pipeline runs end to end: structured text extraction, PPTX structure inspection, slide rendering to PNG, OCR, a vision-review packet, then slide-by-slide notes injected into PowerPoint's notes pane. Each slide gets a visible-element inventory — titles, body text, placeholders, text boxes, table rows and columns, native chart titles, categories, series, values, axes and legends — with an OOXML fallback reaching SmartArt and grouped-shape text python-pptx doesn't expose. Region-scoped OCR reads picture and media regions with a full-slide fallback, and a display version exports as .docx (Markdown when python-docx is missing). v0.8 attacks overrunning directly. A deterministic pacing model budgets English at roughly 110 wpm and Chinese at roughly 165 characters per minute, leaving room for transitions and [PAUSE] marks; a 15-minute talk now lands near 1,300–1,400 words instead of the old ~1,800 that stretched to about 30 minutes. Per-slide word budgets land in a timing table with a TOTAL row, a glossary toggle skips the Key Parameters And Methods table end to end, and `read_slides.py --mode compact` keeps intermediate JSON small on large decks. Set against plug-and-play note generators, Speaker trades convenience for grounding and privacy: everything runs locally off the local .pptx with no cloud upload — useful for embargoed or unpublished research. What you pay in return is setup: a Codex or Claude Code client,
Key features
- Reads titles, body text, placeholders and text boxes from a real .pptx
- Extracts row and column text from PowerPoint tables
- Reads native chart titles, categories, series, values, axes and legends
- OOXML fallback reaches SmartArt and grouped-shape text python-pptx misses
- Renders slides to PNG for visual inspection
- Region-scoped OCR on picture/media regions with full-slide fallback
- Vision-review packet for a vision-capable agent or human reviewer
- Evidence chain tying each spoken sentence to visible slide elements
- Pause-aware pacing at ~110 wpm English and ~165 characters/min Chinese
- Per-slide word budget with timing table, pauses and a TOTAL row
- Glossary toggle to skip the Key Parameters And Methods table end to end
- Compact extraction via read_slides.py --mode compact
- Injects clean speaker notes into the PowerPoint notes pane
- Exports a rehearsal document as .docx with Markdown fallback
- Runs entirely locally from a local .pptx with no cloud upload
Behind the verdict
We'd reach for Speaker when the deck is the hard part. Dense academic slides — a results table, a forest plot, a screenshot of an instrument panel — are exactly where generic note generators fall apart, because they read text boxes and nothing else. Speaker builds a visible-element inventory plus OCR and renders the slides so a vision-capable agent can check the visual, then ties each spoken sentence back to something the audience can see. That traceability is the reason to install it. When to pick it: you present from a real .pptx more than once or twice a year, your slides carry data the bullet text doesn't repeat, and you either work under embargo or would rather not push unpublished figures through a cloud service. The local-only run is a genuine differentiator there, not marketing. When to pass: you want a GUI. This is a skill you import into Codex or a Claude Code client and run from a terminal, and the repo is upfront about needing Python scripts to cooperate. For a single flat deck of bullet points, the setup plus review pass costs more than writing the notes yourself. On pacing: v0.8's deterministic model at ~110 wpm English and ~165 characters/min Chinese is what makes the output usable in rehearsal. The per-slide budget and TOTAL row in the timing table turn "will this fit in 15 minutes" into arithmetic rather than hope. We'd still pad a live run — a real room laughs, interrupts and asks questions — so treat the target as a floor to revise downward. Closest alternative is a generic note generator bolted onto ChatGPT or Copilot in PowerPoint: faster to start, weaker on charts and images, and usually cloud-dependent. Speaker's cost is the install and a review pass; its payoff is notes a reviewer can audit slide by slide. Watch-outs: the OCR scope, compact
Limitations
- Speaker is an open-source Codex skill project, not a hosted product; it requires a Codex-compatible client and comfort running Python scripts from the command line.
- Note generation relies on internal pacing heuristics (e.g. ~110 wpm English) and extraction/OCR/vision pipelines rather than a named external AI model.
- Vision review requires a vision-capable agent or human review pass.
as of 2026-10-20
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Is speaker still active?
speaker is live · free · last verified 9 Nov 2026 · viability monitor.
Viability score
How well maintained and how widely used is speaker? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: November 2026
How we score →What's new in speaker
Checked 13 days agoAcross the latest 1 update: 1 feature update.
What do users say about speaker?
What people actually say about speaker — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
ResearchedDiscussed by users across 4 sources (Hacker News, App Store, Stack Overflow, Lemmy) · researched Oct 16, 2026.
Weighted by the 80 posts each of 4 sources contributed.
- +Every spoken sentence traces back to a visible slide element, not a guess
- +OOXML fallback reaches SmartArt and grouped-shape text python-pptx misses
- +v0.8 pause-aware pacing targets ~1,300–1,400 words for a 15-minute talk
- +Registers titles, body, placeholders, text boxes, tables, and native chart data
- +Runs fully local from the .pptx with no cloud upload of sensitive decks
- −Almost no independent community feedback about the tool itself in scraped sources
- −Requires a Codex or Claude Code client and comfort in a terminal
- −Fixed 110 wpm pacing will misfit fast or slow presenters out of the box
- −Silent degradation when python-docx or OCR backends are missing
- −SmartArt and grouped-shape extraction only via a fallback path
- • Setup time: you must already run Codex or Claude Code and be comfortable with CLI flags
- • Possibly install OCR, python-pptx, and python-docx stacks and debug silent failures
- • Fast or slow speakers will spend extra time retiming the 110 wpm budget by hand
How we verified this
Every listed fact about speaker — pricing, features, links, status — is re-read from the vendor's own pages by our verification pipeline and each change is logged with a date; the last pass ran on 9 Nov 2026. Analysis is drafted with AI models and checked against our editorial standards before publishing; see how we verify.
Verification history
We have re-verified speaker 18 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — changed description, pricing tiers, our verdict, summary
- — changed pricing page
- — changed summary, features, pricing tiers, who should skip it, who it suits, description, our verdict
- — changed limitations, pricing page
- — changed features, our verdict, summary, pricing tiers, description
- — changed pricing page
Showing the 6 most recent of 18 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
How much does speaker cost in 2026?
speaker: Free to use. Pricing last verified 9 Nov 2026.
Plans compared
Every published speaker tier, its price as the vendor publishes it, who it fits, and what it adds over the tier below. The 12-month cost projection follows.
| Plan | Price | Billing | Who it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Source (MIT) | Free | — | Researchers, lecturers and developers who already run a Codex or Claude Code client and present dense academic or technical decks more than once.Adds: Starting (and only) tier: full speaker-v8.skill free under MIT, local .pptx processing with no cloud upload, visible-element inventory, OOXML fallback, PNG rendering with region-scoped OCR, and pause-aware pacing with per-slide budgets. |
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where speaker's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Speaker costs nothing: the speaker-v8.skill package is free under MIT, with no seat count, usage meter or plan upgrade. That puts it well below paid GUI note generators and dedicated AI presentation tools, and its only real cost is your time — a Python/Codex setup session and one review pass per deck. Budget that time, not dollars, when comparing it to a subscription you would pay on for a single conference talk.
Has speaker's pricing changed?
No plan price for speaker has moved since we began logging in Aug 2026; the pricing page is re-read on every verification pass.
Who should pick speaker?
Pick speaker if you are Academics and lecturers scripting decks full of charts, SmartArt, tables and text inside images, Researchers who need every spoken sentence traceable to something visible on the slide, Conference and training presenters against a hard time slot who keep overrunning, Developers and technical users comfortable running Python scripts from a terminal.
Look elsewhere if you are Non-technical presenters who want a plug-and-play GUI instead of a skill install, Anyone needing real-time collaboration or shared editing of speaker notes, One-off talks where Python setup and a review pass cost more than writing notes by hand, Flat text-bullet decks with no charts, images, tables or SmartArt to inventory.
Skip it if Skip Speaker if you want a click-to-generate GUI and have no Codex or Claude Code client or Python environment — the skill is free, but the setup-plus-review pass only pays off on decks you will present more than once.
GeneratedReal-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas speaker actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Run the skill against the .pptx so read_slides.py inventories titles, table rows and native chart series-axes-legends, visual_inventory.py OCRs the embedded screenshots with --ocr-scope image-regions, then review each slide's notes against the visible-element list before the session.
Outcome: A script where every sentence traces to something on the slide, with clean notes written into the PowerPoint notes pane and a .docx rehearsal copy.
Generate notes with the glossary toggle left on for methods slides and off for the Key Parameters And Methods table, then check the timing table against the 90-minute lecture slot using the per-slide word budget.
Outcome: A lecture script sized to the class period rather than an overrun, with SmartArt and grouped-shape text captured by the OOXML fallback instead of silently dropped.
Use the v0.8 pause-aware pacing model (~110 wpm English) to pull the script to roughly 1,300–1,400 words, then read the timing table's words, budget and pauses columns per slide.
Outcome: A rehearsal cut that lands near the time limit instead of the old ~1,800-word script that ran close to 30 minutes.
Use cases
- Generate speaker notes for a 50-slide academic conference presentation with charts and images
- Create a lecture script for a university course deck containing SmartArt and embedded screenshots
- Add missing speaker notes to a legacy PPTX with OCR-reliant scanned slides
- Prepare a fact-checked script for a technical webinar with tables and chart axes
- Fit a recorded talk to a strict time limit using the per-slide word budget and timing table
- Let a vision-capable agent review slides for accuracy using the compact review packet
- Keep an unpublished or embargoed deck local by generating notes without any cloud upload
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of speaker — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Plan on a setup session: install a Codex or Claude Code client, drop in speaker-v8.skill, and get Python plus python-pptx working so the pipeline can read the .pptx and render slides. Developers already running scripts from a terminal get to a first drafted deck in the same sitting; non-technical presenters should budget longer, plus a review pass on the generated notes before rehearsal.
Switching to or from speaker
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From writing notes by hand: point the skill at your existing .pptx and it inventories visible elements before drafting, so nothing on the slide gets missed.
- →From ChatGPT-style note generation: keep the deck local instead of pasting slide text into a chat, since Speaker runs entirely off the local file with no cloud upload.
- →From python-pptx-only note scripts: the OOXML fallback adds SmartArt and grouped-shape text those scripts skip, and OCR covers text inside screenshots.
- ↗To a paid GUI note generator: expect faster setup without Python, but check whether it inventories chart axes, legends and OCR'd screenshots or only text boxes.
- ↗To writing manually: keep the generated .docx rehearsal document as a reference outline and rewrite slide by slide.
Integrations
Resources & guides
- Resourcegithub.com
Speaker · speaker
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
README · speaker
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
README.Zh · speaker
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
CLAUDE · speaker
Helpful link from github.com
- Resourcegithub.com
Ppt Speech Writer · speaker
Helpful link from github.com
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “speaker”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “speaker” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about speaker.
Official links
What are the best speaker alternatives?
The closest alternatives to speaker we list are CubeOne AI, Pitch and Plus AI. Ranked by direct product-type match, not category overlap.
| Alternative | Pricing | Starts at | Last verified |
|---|---|---|---|
| CubeOne AI | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| Pitch | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
| Plus AI | Freemium | Pricing not published | — |
Alternatives to speaker
View all
CubeOne AI
CubeOne is an AI slide maker that builds designed decks from a prompt or .pptx — and keeps every element editable.
Tools that pair well with speaker
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside speaker, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
CubeOne AI
CubeOne is an AI slide maker that builds designed decks from a prompt or .pptx — and keeps every element editable.
Pitch
AI presentation workspace where teams generate on-brand decks, share tracked pitch rooms, and see per-slide engagement
Plus AI
AI presentation maker that builds native PowerPoint and Google Slides decks from a prompt or a file
speaker vs its closest rival
speaker's closest head-to-head is with Chili Piper — These two don't compete — they don't even serve the same department. Speaker is a free, MIT-licensed Codex skill that reads a local .pptx, inventories the charts, tables and SmartArt, and writes traceable speaker notes into PowerPoint; if you're a lecturer or researcher timing a talk, the price is zero and the only cost is terminal comfort. Chili Piper is a paid B2B conversion engine whose job is turning anonymous site visitors into calendar bookings for sales reps, with a $12/user/mo ChiliCal entry point that still carries a 200-seat minimum. Pick based on your problem, not this page: scripts for a deck → Speaker; meetings on a calendar → Chili Piper. Verdict generated
Head-to-head comparisons
Speaker vs Chili Piper
These two don't compete — they don't even serve the same department. Speaker is a free, MIT-licensed Codex skill that reads a local .pptx, inventories the charts, tables and SmartArt, and writes traceable speaker notes into PowerPoint; if you're a lecturer or researcher timing a talk, the price is zero and the only cost is terminal comfort. Chili Piper is a paid B2B conversion engine whose job is turning anonymous site visitors into calendar bookings for sales reps, with a $12/user/mo ChiliCal entry point that still carries a 200-seat minimum. Pick based on your problem, not this page: scripts for a deck → Speaker; meetings on a calendar → Chili Piper.
GeneratedSpeaker vs Temporal Ai
These aren't competitors — nobody is choosing between a durable execution platform and a Codex skill for PowerPoint notes. If your problem is that AI agents and multi-step workflows die mid-flight and you need state recovery, retries, and Saga compensation, Temporal is the answer, and its named production users (OpenAI, NVIDIA, Salesforce, Twilio) plus the recent Rust SDK 1.0 GA and Oso authorization hires signal a serious platform. If your problem is that you have a dense .pptx and need a traceable script that matches what's on screen within a time slot, Speaker is the free, offline, MIT-licensed tool — provided you're comfortable in a terminal. Buy them both if you have both problems; that's the honest answer.
GeneratedSpeaker vs Audioeye
These two products are not competitors — they solve unrelated problems for unrelated buyers, and the data gives no reason to pick one over the other. If you are a terminal-comfortable presenter scripting a dense deck, Speaker is free and directly targets that job. If you run a large, frequently changing site with ADA/Section 508/VPAT pressure, AudioEye is the managed accessibility platform in this pairing. Buy whichever matches your actual problem; there is no decision to arbitrate between them.
GeneratedFrequently asked questions
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