Say what the session has to change
Describe the workshop in a sentence or two. Captivate proposes a narrative map — movements and moments, each one stating its purpose and what the room leaves with. Nothing is drawn yet.
For trainers and facilitators
Design the next workshop as an argument, not a slide reel
Captivate agrees the shape of your session with you before it draws anything, lets you change one beat without rewriting the rest, and puts the questions you ask the room on the scene itself. When the client wants a deck afterwards, it exports one.
The canvas needs no account. Neither does the live demo on the home page — it runs the real presentation engine in your browser.
The problem is not making slides
A live session usually runs out of four tools that do not know about each other: one for the deck, one for the board, one for the agenda, one for asking the room. The moment you want a question answered, you send thirty people to a different website, and some of the attention you just built does not come back.
Captivate is one canvas for the session itself — the argument, the delivery, and the questions — with an export for the deck the client files afterwards.
How building one session goes
Argue with the map, not the slides
Reorder it, rewrite a moment, cut one. This is the cheap place to change your mind. When the shape is one you would stand behind, generate from it.
Fix one beat without disturbing the rest
Regenerate a single moment and the others stay as they are. Lock the ones you have settled so a later pass cannot touch them.
Present it, and ask the room
A private console holds your notes and timers. Put a question on a scene and participants answer from their own phones; the count grows on the canvas in front of everyone, without sending anyone to another website.
What Captivate does not do
Worth knowing before you spend an evening on it, rather than after.
There is no visual PowerPoint import
You cannot bring last year's branded deck in and have it look the same. A .pptx is read slide by slide — titles, bullets and speaker notes — to seed a generation, and a .docx by its headings and paragraphs, but layouts, pictures and branding do not come across. Captivate is for the session you are designing now, not for migrating a back catalogue.
The export flattens the journey
Export to PowerPoint or Keynote works and keeps your notes, which is what most clients actually ask for. What it cannot carry is the camera movement — a spatial presentation becomes ordinary slides once it is a .pptx.
Reference material is text, and is not stored
Attach a document to ground a generation and Captivate extracts up to 60,000 characters of text from a file up to 25 MB, sends it with that one generation, and keeps none of it. Generating again next week means attaching the file again.
The room uses their own phones
Audience questions need each participant to open a short web address on their own device. There is no app to install and no account to create, but there is no second screen magic either — it is a link and a code.
Try it on the session you are already writing
The free plan includes the whole product — presenting, the console, annotation, audience questions, recording and export — with a monthly allowance of AI-generated presentations. Paid plans raise that allowance. See what each plan includes.