When Emma Goes Quiet, and What to Do About It

The avatar is a status lamp, not a mascot

Emma sits in the corner of the planner canvas, in the 2D plan and in 3D. Left-click starts a voice call. Click her again to hang up. Right-click opens the typing panel. That is the entire control surface — there is no settings drawer, no push-to-talk key, no separate microphone button somewhere else on the screen.

What most people miss is that how solid she looks is information, on purpose. Faded means she is not listening — the microphone is not open, nothing is being sent, and nothing is being spent. Solid, with a ring around her, means the line is live. If you are ever unsure whether you are being heard, do not judge by whether she answered. Look at the corner.

She also fades further while you hold the mouse button down on the canvas. That is deliberate: the seconds when you are actually dragging a cabinet into position are the seconds she should be out of your way. Release the mouse and she returns to whatever state she was already in. It is not a dropped call and it is not a bug.

Four things have to be true before a voice call can start — a browser that supports live audio, a Google sign-in, microphone permission granted to this site, and time available on the account. If any one of the four is missing, the click does not fail silently. It drops you into the typing panel and tells you which of the four was the problem. Read that line before you read the rest of this page; it is the fastest diagnosis here.

What they search at 11pm “AI voice assistant not working” — usually while the microphone is perfectly fine and the browser is asking a permission question behind another window.

Nothing happens when you click her, or she cannot hear you

These feel identical and are not. If clicking her opens the typing panel instead of starting a call, the fallback is doing its job and the reason is written in the panel. Two causes account for almost all of it: you are not signed in, or the browser you are using has no support for live audio. Sign in with Google, or open the planner in a current version of Chrome, Edge, Safari or Firefox, and click her again.

The other case is worse to sit through: the call starts, the ring appears, and she never says anything back. That means the connection is up and the fault is upstream of her, in the microphone. Work through these in this order, because they are ordered by how often they turn out to be the answer.

• Look at the ring before you look at anything elseSolid with a ring means a call is running and the microphone is the suspect. Faded means no call started at all, and you are in the paragraph above, not this list.Why it mattersHalf the microphone hunts we hear about were never microphone problems. The call had not started.
• Check the site permission in the address barClick the padlock or the sliders icon to the left of the web address. If microphone access says Blocked, the browser remembered a No you clicked once, possibly months ago, and it will keep remembering it forever without asking again.FixSet it to Allow, then reload the page and start the call again. Permission changes are picked up when a call begins, not in the middle of one.
• Look for the device the permission is attached toBrowsers remember permission against a specific input. A headset you have since unplugged can leave the site politely holding a permission for a microphone that is no longer in the room — which looks exactly like being allowed and hearing nothing.FixIn the same permission panel, choose the input you are actually speaking into, then reload.
• Close whatever else has the microphoneA video call in another tab, a meeting app minimised in the dock, a recorder you opened this morning. On several browser and operating-system combinations, the first application to claim the microphone keeps it, and everything afterwards gets a live-looking connection with a level that never moves.FixQuit the other application — not just its window — then start the call again. This is the single most common cause on a work laptop.
• Check the input at the operating-system levelSystem Settings then Sound then Input on a Mac, Sound settings on Windows. The default is often something you never chose: a monitor connected over HDMI that reports a microphone it does not have, or a headset that disconnected when its battery died.FixSelect the right input, speak, and watch the level meter move in the system panel before you go back to the browser. If it does not move there, the browser was never going to hear you.

She went quiet in the middle of my work

This is the report we get most, and nearly every time it is standby working exactly as designed. After five quiet minutes, the connection closes on purpose. You did not lose your internet and she did not crash. The line was open, nobody was talking, and holding it open would have cost you time you were not using.

Three things stay true while she is in standby, and they are the parts worth knowing:

• Your microphone stays on — the browser indicator remains lit, which alarms people until they know why.
• Nothing leaves your computer — during standby the page only measures the loudness of the room locally, so it can tell speech from silence without sending any audio anywhere.
• She comes back when you have actually been speaking — for a moment, not for a single syllable, which is why a cough, a chair scrape or the dog does not wake her.
• She keeps the thread — reconnect and she still knows what “that one” referred to and what you were in the middle of.
• After about twenty minutes of silence she lets the microphone go entirely — the ring disappears and the call is genuinely over. Starting again is one click.

There is a short beat between you starting to talk and her being back on the line. Talk through it rather than stopping to check — the first second or so of your sentence is what wakes her, and if you keep going she catches the rest of it.

The reason standby exists at all is arithmetic, not cleverness. Live voice is paid for in five-minute blocks. A line left open through a long silence spends a block on an empty room, so the line closes and the microphone waits instead. It is the same instinct as switching off a light in a room you left.

She said she did it, and nothing moved

This one is genuinely confusing, because she is not lying and you are not imagining it. There are four causes, and the fourth is responsible for more head-scratching than the other three put together.

• You were in 3D and editing had to be switched on firstIn the 3D view, nothing can be moved until edit mode is active. Her tools turn it on themselves, and she says so out loud while it happens. What you see is a beat where the view changes mode before the cabinet actually moves — which reads as nothing happening, right up until it does.FixWait for the view to settle and look again. If she said she switched editing on, she switched it on.
• Several things were selected at onceThe planner treats a multiple selection as a group. So “move it left” moves all of them, or moves none of them because one member of the group had nowhere to go — and either way it is not the single cabinet you had in your head.FixClick empty floor to clear the selection, then name the item by its number rather than saying “it”.
• The item lives inside a packed groupA packed group behaves as one object. Its members are not individually addressable until the group is unpacked, so an instruction aimed at one cabinet inside it has nothing to land on.FixUnpack the group first, make the change, and repack it afterwards if you want it to travel as a unit again.
• The number moved under youEvery removal renumbers everything after it. Delete number 4 and the old number 5 becomes 4. So the number you both used a minute ago now points at a different cabinet, and she will move exactly what you asked for — which is no longer what you meant.FixAfter any deletion, ask her to list the items again and work from the new numbers. Make it a reflex: delete, then re-list. It costs one sentence and saves the confusion entirely.

If she moved the wrong thing, say so immediately, while the numbering still means what it meant when you spoke. Waiting until you have made three more changes turns a one-sentence correction into an archaeology problem. For the full list of what she can and cannot change, see the voice commands page; for how she knows what is on your screen in the first place, that is explained here.

When she refuses, the refusal is the answer

She is instructed to tell you why she is not doing something rather than quietly doing something adjacent and hoping you do not notice. That makes a refusal genuinely useful information about your kitchen, and it is worth reading it as a finding rather than a failure. Four of them cover almost everything.

The first refusal is the one people argue with, and it is usually right. A wall is whatever length the builder made it; cabinets come in fixed widths; the leftover is what fillers are for. If the refusal is about the kitchen rather than the software — a run that will not close, a corner that will not work, an appliance that will not fit — then it is a design problem and the chapter on fixing things is a better read than another attempt at phrasing.

Interrupting her, typing instead, and knowing when to stop

To interrupt her, just start talking. She stops. There is no key to hold and no polite gap to wait for, and you should use it far more than feels natural — if she is three sentences into explaining something you already know, talk over her. That is how the conversation is meant to go.

To type instead, right-click the avatar. The typing panel will answer questions and explain what it can see, but it has no tools: it cannot move, add or delete anything. Only a voice call can edit the design. That split is deliberate rather than an oversight, and the practical consequence is that a typed “move it left” earns you a helpful explanation of how to move it left, not a cabinet that has moved.

She works in English, Mandarin Chinese and French. Speak the language you want to be answered in.

And then the part nobody in software likes writing down: voice is not the fastest way to do everything, and using it for the wrong jobs is the most common reason people conclude it does not work.

• Use voice for questions“Why is there a gap there?”, “What is that panel for?”, “Is this island too tight?” She can see the room you are looking at, which is the thing a search engine cannot do.
• Use voice for “what should I do next”The moment you are stuck and do not know the name of what you need, describing the problem out loud is far quicker than guessing a menu.
• Use voice for edits you can describe faster than you can find“Delete number 6 and put a 24″ base there instead” beats hunting the catalogue, every time.

Reach for the mouse instead when the job is any of these:

• Precise numeric positioning — dragging while you watch the dimension update is faster and more certain than saying a number and checking whether it landed.
• Colours and finishes — you want to see the swatch against the room, and that is a matter of clicking through the palette, not describing a shade.
• Anything already three clicks away — if you know where the button is, use the button.
• Long lists of similar edits — ten identical changes in a row are a job for select-and-drag, not for ten sentences.

If your problem is that she misunderstands what you meant rather than that she cannot hear you, the phrasing that works is collected in what to say to an AI kitchen designer.

How the free minutes and the blocks actually work

Live voice runs in five-minute blocks. The block is the unit — it is not metered by the second, and that is why standby matters so much.

Every account gets ten free minutes a day, which is two blocks. The day rolls over on the Toronto calendar day, so if you are designing from another time zone, that is the clock to picture rather than your own midnight. After the free time is used, voice costs 1 GH Coin per five-minute block. Typing to her costs nothing at all, and has no blocks.

The rule that keeps this fair is the renewal condition: a block only renews if you actually spoke during it, and spoke within the last minute and a half. A call you walked away from does not quietly buy another block behind your back. Put that together with standby closing the connection after five quiet minutes, and it is genuinely difficult to spend time on an empty room.

When you see the message that the free time is used up, it means exactly that: the daily allowance is spent and there is no coin balance to carry the next block. Nothing else has broken, and your design is untouched. You have three options, and the third one is free forever.

• Come back tomorrowThe daily allowance resets on the Toronto calendar day. If you were most of the way through a plan, this costs you nothing but a night.
• Top up coinsCoins are the same unit the other AI extras in the planner use, so a balance you already have will carry a call.
• Right-click and typeFree, unlimited, and she will still answer questions and explain what she can see — she simply cannot change the design from there.

Everything else in the planner — drawing the room, placing cabinets, countertops, colours, the 3D view, the quote — is free and has nothing to do with these blocks. The clock only runs while a voice call is live.

What happens to what you say

People ask this before they let a website open a microphone, and they are right to. Here is the whole of it, plainly.

Talking to Emma by voice is not recorded at all. The audio goes from your browser straight to the speech provider that turns sound into words and words back into sound. It does not reach us. We do not keep a transcript of it. When the call ends there is nothing on our side to replay, because there was never anything to replay in the first place.

Typed conversations are kept — what was asked and what was answered. That is the honest difference between the two panels, and it is worth knowing when you choose which one to use. If you would rather a particular question were not stored anywhere, ask it out loud.

During standby the microphone stays on but nothing is transmitted. The page measures the loudness of the room locally, purely so it can notice that a person has started speaking. It is not listening for words while it does that, and it is not sending audio anywhere. That is also why she wakes to a spoken sentence and not to a cough: a level is all the page has to work with.

All of this is written down in our privacy policy, which is the version that governs rather than this paragraph.

The limit of what we can promise: we can tell you what our own software does, and we have. We cannot make promises on behalf of your browser, your operating system, or an extension somebody installed on your machine. If there is something confidential being said in the room, end the call rather than trusting a status light — not because we know of a problem, but because that is sound practice with every microphone on every site you will ever use.