Turn a PDF, Word File or PowerPoint Into a Quiz With AI

You have a chapter of notes, a slide deck from last year, or a worksheet you scanned on the copier, and you want ten good questions about it before Friday. Typing them from scratch takes an evening. Kwizzy's AI generation reads the material and drafts the questions for you, and you edit them before anyone sees them.

This post covers what you can upload, how to get decent results from each kind of source, and the cases where the AI will give you nothing useful. AI drafting is part of the paid plans, so a free account writes its questions by hand. Everything else in Kwizzy works without it.

What you can give it

The upload box accepts these kinds of source:

• A PDF, a Word file (.docx) or a PowerPoint file (.pptx)
• A plain text or Markdown file (.txt, .md)
• Photos: JPG, PNG or WebP
• A link to a web page
• No file at all: a short written instruction, such as "ten questions on the causes of the American Revolution for eighth graders"

You also choose how many questions you want. The AI aims for that number but may return fewer if the material is thin. Most of the questions are multiple choice. It mixes in true/false, pick-several or short typed answers where they fit, and keeps those to roughly one question in five.

Each question comes back with its answer options, the right answer marked, and sometimes a short explanation that shows with the answer reveal. The result lands in the normal quiz editor, so nothing is final until you say so.

Match the source to the method

Different files fail in different ways. Here is what happens to each.

Word files, text files and most PDFs. Kwizzy pulls out the text and sends that. This is the happy path. A typed handout or an article saved as a PDF works well.

PowerPoint. Kwizzy reads the text on the slides and the speaker notes. That second part is useful: if you wrote what you actually say in the notes, the AI gets far more to work with than the bullet points. The problem is a deck made mostly of pictures, such as screenshots, diagrams pasted in as images, or slides exported from another tool. There is no text to read. For those, export the slides as images (in PowerPoint: File, Export, then choose JPEG) and upload the pictures instead.

Scanned PDFs. A PDF that is really a photo of a page has no text inside it. When Kwizzy sees this, it sends the pages to the AI as pictures, which works, but those pages count as photos rather than as text. If the scan is crooked or dim, results get worse.

Photos. Shoot flat, in good light, one page per photo, and crop out the desk, your thumb and the next page. Photos are shrunk in your browser before upload to keep the file small. Text that is already hard to read in the photo will be hard for the AI too, so retake a blurry one rather than hoping.

Links. The page text is fetched and read. Pages behind a login, or ones that load their content only after you scroll, may come back empty. If a link gives you nothing, copy the text into a document and upload that.

Smaller sources make better questions

It is tempting to upload an entire textbook chapter and ask for thirty questions. Resist that. A long, wandering source gives the AI no sense of what matters, so it spreads questions thinly and leans on whatever phrases stand out.

A better habit: upload one section, one lesson, or one set of slides, and ask for the number of questions that section deserves. If you need a unit test, generate several short quizzes and combine the questions you like in the editor. Every plan also has a cap on how much the AI reads in one go, which the upload box shows you before you start. If your text is over it, Kwizzy cuts the text at the limit and tells you it did, so you know the end of your document was left out.

Shorter, cleaner input also saves you editing time. A source full of page numbers, headers and "Figure 3.2" captions produces questions about page numbers and figures.

Read every question before you use it

This is the step people skip, and the one that matters most. The AI can misread a table, pick a trivial detail, or write a "wrong" option that is actually defensible. Treat the output as a first draft from a quick assistant who has read your handout but has not met your students.

A quick check that takes about a minute per question:

1. Is the marked answer actually right, according to your source?
2. Could a student reasonably argue for a different option?
3. Does the question test something you taught, or a stray fact?
4. Are the wrong options plausible, rather than obviously silly?

Delete the weak questions and rewrite the ones that are close. You can also use the AI's batch edit on a finished quiz to apply one instruction to all of it, such as making the wording simpler. It never creates or changes pictures in your questions, so any images or maths diagrams you add stay as you left them.

When not to use it

Some jobs are better done by hand. If the quiz is five questions about something you said in class this morning, typing it is faster than finding a source. If the material is highly specific to your school, such as a lab procedure or a classroom routine, the AI has no way to know the details unless you give them. And if you need an assessment that is strictly graded and locked down, remember that Kwizzy runs quiz-style games and homework, not proctored exams.

For common topics there may be no need to generate anything. The library already has ready-made quizzes you can play or host, such as Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration or Ancient Rome.

Where this fits in your week

Once you are making your own quizzes regularly, the time saved by AI drafting is the main reason teachers move up from the free plan. Check the pricing page to see which plan includes it and how much it will read per quiz.