Design a Kitchen by Talking to It

Talking about a kitchen is not talking to your kitchen

Any general assistant will happily discuss kitchens with you. It knows the work triangle, it knows quartz is harder than marble, and it can talk about all of it beautifully. What it cannot do is see the thing on your screen. Ask it “why is this cabinet floating” and it has no idea what this is.

A voice attached to the planner is a different animal, and the difference is entirely about what it can read:

• A general chatbot — knows kitchens in general, knows nothing about yours. Useful for “what depth are wall cabinets usually”, useless for “what did I just break”
• A help-desk bot bolted onto a tool — can quote the manual back at you. Better, but it still cannot tell whether you actually did the thing the manual describes
• A voice that reads the live design — knows which view you are in, which cabinet is selected, how wide it is, which wall it is on, and what the app told you thirty seconds ago

What they search at midnight “kitchen design software help” — at the exact moment they cannot describe the problem in words the help page uses.

She reads a transcript of your screen, not a picture of it

The obvious way to build this is to screenshot the canvas and hand it to a vision model. We deliberately did not, and the reason is worth knowing if you are comparing tools.

Everything on that screen is already an exact number inside the planner: the cabinet is a B30, it is thirty inches wide, it sits on wall 2, it is eight inches off the floor. Showing a picture of that to an image model and asking it to guess those numbers back takes facts we already have and turns them into an estimate. So instead, every time she needs to know what is going on, the planner hands her a short written statement of the current state:

• Where you are — 2D plan, 3D, elevation, countertop mode
• The room — walls, their lengths, ceiling heights
• The selection — which item, its code and size, which wall it sits on, how far off the floor
• The warnings — anything currently flagged as overlapping or out of bounds
• The last few things you did — and the last message the app popped up at you

Which is why the answers sound like a colleague leaning over: “your B30 on wall two is eight inches off the floor — that is why the toe kick disappeared”, rather than “please check whether the cabinet is elevated.”

What it is genuinely good for

• “Why can’t I…”The single most common question in any design tool, and the one help pages are worst at. Nine times out of ten the answer is in the current state — a tool still switched on, nothing selected, an item lifted off the floor, a snap fighting you.Say“Why won’t this move?” — then keep dragging while she looks.
• “What is this thing called?”Cabinet vocabulary is the barrier to entry for the whole hobby. Filler, scribe, reveal, blind corner, end panel. Asking out loud costs you nothing and you learn the word in context, attached to the object in front of you.Say“What is that narrow strip next to the fridge for?”
• “What should I do next?”This one does not go to the model at all. It runs the planner’s own step planner over your real layout — the same deterministic thing the on-screen suggestions use — and comes back with one concrete recommendation, or with the one question it needs answered first. She says it in plain language, then asks whether you want it placed.Say“What now?” — and “yes, go ahead” if you like the answer.

That last exchange is the part people are surprised by: the cabinet appears in the design, in a real size, from the real catalogue, as one undoable step. She is not drawing it — she is pressing the button you would have pressed.

What we deliberately did not let her do

A voice that can change your design is only pleasant if it is boring and predictable about it. Four rules, all of them on purpose:

• She never invents a cabinet or a size — every recommendation comes from the planner and the catalogue. If the planner has a question instead of an answer, she asks you that question
• Nothing is placed without an explicit yes — and everything she does place is one step of undo, exactly like your own edits
• She does not fill the silence — you will go quiet for five minutes dragging cabinets, and she is instructed to let you. No check-ins, no “how’s it going”
• She says when she does not know — DIY and product answers are grounded in the written guide rather than improvised, and when the lookup comes back empty she says so and points you at a human

And the honest gaps: she cannot judge whether your kitchen looks nice, cannot see colour or finish the way you can, and cannot take a measurement of your real room. Nothing about a microphone changes the fact that the tape measure is still your job. Chapter 01 is still the chapter that matters most.

How the call behaves when you stop talking

Live voice models cost real money per minute, which creates an obvious temptation: leave the line open and let it run. We went the other way, and made the state visible so you never have to wonder.

Why it works that way: a call is billed in blocks, so an open line during a long silence is a block you paid for and did not use. Every account gets ten minutes of voice to try, and after that voice runs on GH Coin like the other AI extras. Typing to her is free, needs no account, and is always there as the fallback.

Thirty seconds to your first question

• Open the designerNothing to install, no signup to start drawing. The free planner is here.
• Find the small avatar in the cornerShe is there in 2D and in 3D, faded, deliberately quiet. She introduces herself once, the first time.
• Left-click her to start talkingClick again to hang up. Voice needs you signed in and needs microphone permission — the browser will ask.No microphone?Right-click her instead: that opens the typing panel, which needs neither an account nor a microphone.
• Just talkEnglish, Mandarin or French by default; Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Spanish and Portuguese can be picked for a call. Speak normally — she is built for one or two sentences at a time, not speeches.

If any of that is unavailable — a browser that will not do live audio, a microphone you would rather not grant — you land in the typing panel with an explanation rather than a dead button.

Is voice the right way for you to design?

• “I have never used design software before.” Yes. The vocabulary barrier is the real barrier, and asking out loud dissolves it faster than any tutorial.
• “I know exactly what I want and where.” Probably not. Precise placement is faster with a mouse; keep her for the questions.
• “I’m stuck and about to give up.” This is the case it was built for. Ask the question in the words you would use to a friend.
• “I’m measuring, hands full, phone on the counter.” Yes — but the numbers still come from the tape, not from her.
• “I want it to design the whole kitchen for me.” That is a different tool: the automatic layout generator does the whole room at once, and she can talk you through the result.