Turn hours of slide work into minutes. Generate presentation-ready slides from your enterprise data through natural conversation — while respecting Unity Catalog permissions.
Your teams spend hours every week building slides from enterprise data. They pull numbers from dashboards, copy-paste charts, write narratives, and fight with formatting.
AI slide generators exist — but they can't touch your governed data without breaking security controls.
tellr is an agentic application that generates data-driven presentations from your Databricks environment:
- Connected to your data — Queries your Genie spaces for live, governed data
- Respects permissions — Uses Unity Catalog security out of the box
- Conversational editing — Refine slides through natural language ("add a comparison to Q3", "make the EMEA section more prominent")
- Prompt-only mode — Works without Genie for general-purpose slide generation
- Agent-ready — Call tellr from other Databricks Apps or MCP-compatible agents (Claude Code, Cursor) via a Model Context Protocol server. Programmatically generated decks are attributed to the end user and appear alongside UI-created ones. See the MCP Integration Guide.
tellr is the third pillar in Databricks' AI/BI suite, completing the story alongside Genie and Dashboards: conversational analytics, conversational dashboards, and now conversational presentations.
- Databricks workspace with Apps enabled
- Permission to create a Lakebase (or create a schema in an existing one)
- Genie space with your data (optional — tellr works in prompt-only mode without Genie)
From a Databricks notebook:
%pip install --upgrade databricks-tellr databricks-sdk==0.96.0
dbutils.library.restartPython()import databricks_tellr as tellr
# Deploy tellr to your workspace
tellr.create(
lakebase_name="tellr-db",
schema_name="app_data",
app_name="tellr",
app_file_workspace_path="/Workspace/Users/you@example.com/.apps/tellr"
)That's it. Open your Databricks Apps to find tellr running.
Optional — MLflow traces in Unity Catalog: For production, you can route GenAI traces to UC Delta tables (recommended for some Apps deployments). Configure mlflow_tracing in config/deployment.yaml, set TELLR_DEPLOY_MLFLOW_* env vars at deploy time, or pass mlflow_tracing={...} to tellr.create / tellr.update. See docs/technical/mlflow-uc-tracing.md.
# Update an existing deployment
tellr.update(
app_name="tellr",
app_file_workspace_path="/Workspace/Users/you@example.com/.apps/tellr",
lakebase_name="tellr-db",
schema_name="app_data",
)
# Delete (optionally reset database)
tellr.delete(
app_name="tellr",
lakebase_name="tellr-db",
schema_name="app_data",
reset_database=True,
)Step-by-step instructions with screenshots:
| Guide | Description |
|---|---|
| Generating Slides | Create presentations through conversation |
| Creating Profiles | Configure data sources, styles, and templates |
| Advanced Configuration | Customize deck prompts and slide styles |
Quick start:
- Select or create a profile (bundles your Genie space, slide style, and deck prompt)
- Go to Generator
- Describe the presentation you want
- Send — watch slides stream in
- Refine through conversation
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ You: "Create a 10-slide presentation about Q3 revenue trends" │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┘
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ tellr Agent (LangChain) │
│ ├─ Queries Genie for live data (respects Unity Catalog perms) │
│ ├─ Analyzes patterns, generates insights │
│ └─ Produces HTML slides with Chart.js visualizations │
└──────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────────────┘
▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Interactive slide deck you can edit, reorder, and export │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| Local Development | Run tellr locally for development |
| Backend Overview | FastAPI, agent lifecycle, API contracts |
| Frontend Overview | React components, state management |
| Databricks Deployment | Deployment CLI, environments |
| MCP Integration Guide | How-to: wire tellr into your Databricks App or into an MCP client like Claude Code |
| MCP Server Reference | Protocol, tool schemas, response payloads |
| Database Config | PostgreSQL/Lakebase schema |
| Document | Description |
|---|---|
| Real-Time Streaming | SSE events, conversation persistence |
| Slide Parser | HTML parsing, CSS merging |
| Slide Editing | Deck preservation, validation |
| Save Points | Version snapshots, preview/restore |
| Google Slides | OAuth2 flow, encrypted credentials, LLM export |
tellr is open source and in early-stage development (equivalent to private preview). We're actively developing new features and welcome feedback.
Questions? Reach out to your Databricks account team.
Apache 2.0