One kitchen, designed out loud from the first wall to the moment it has a name. Where the mouse still does the work, where a sentence is faster, and the four places the planner says no.
The kitchen in this walkthrough is deliberately ordinary: an L, one door in the far corner, a window over what will become the sink wall, a 30″ range and a dishwasher that must not end up opening across the corner cabinet. It takes about twenty-five minutes from an empty file to a plan saved under a name, and most of that is not talking. What follows is the session in order — the parts where you hold a mouse, the parts where a sentence beats three menus, and the handful of moments where the planner refuses and the refusal is the most useful thing in the room.
A voice call is a quick way to move cabinets around a room. It is not a way to find out how big the room is. Four things want settling first, and three of them happen away from the screen.
Then the part people expect voice to have replaced, and it has not: the walls get drawn with the mouse. Not because we ran out of time to build her a wall tool, but because a room is a shape, and a shape is faster to draw than to describe. Four clicks and two typed lengths gives an exact rectangle; the spoken version is four sentences, each of which can be misheard.
So draw the outline, type the real lengths, and set the ceiling height per wall if yours does something interesting.
Then put in, with the mouse too, the three things the rest of the plan is measured from: the sink, the range and the fridge. Drag them in from the Catalog (a sink base’s Align to current window centres it under the window), or click one of the spots the AI Suggestion panel offers for each — it is on the 3D toolbar with Edit 3D on. If this kitchen has no fridge or no range, say so on the panel instead: No fridge in this kitchen, No stove in this kitchen. The reason is not taste: AI Suggestion asks about those three before it recommends a single cabinet, and its questions are answered with buttons on its panel. A voice call can read the question out, but it cannot press the button. Only then is there anything for her to talk about.
Add a sink base · 0:24Add the range and fridge · 1:25
What they search at midnight “design my kitchen with AI step by step” — step one is a tape measure and step two is a mouse. That is not the tool failing you; it is the twenty minutes that makes everything after it true.
Say “what should I do next” into an empty file and the answer comes back as add walls first. That is the correct answer, not a failure — AI Suggestion reasons over your actual layout, and it will not recommend a cabinet into a room that does not exist yet.
Click the Ask Emma button in the 2D toolbar, the speech bubble with a question mark (inside the All tools button when the window is too narrow for the whole strip), and the call opens. The button lights up green, which is the only status light you need: unlit means the microphone is off and nothing is being spent, green means the line is live. A call runs in one of two modes, and this whole walkthrough is the second one: chat is her answering and looking things up, with the tools that change a kitchen never handed to her, while action is the mode that adds, moves, swaps, removes, undoes, saves and opens designs while you talk. To choose it, right-click Ask Emma, pick Do it for me at the top of her panel and confirm the price card; the choice is remembered, and each editing call asks you to confirm once. Chat is free on Pro, Designer and Studio and comes with free minutes a day on any other account; action has no free allowance on any plan, and section 06 does that arithmetic. Then say the sentence that does more work than any other: what should I do next?
That one does not go to the language model at all. It runs the planner’s own step logic over your actual layout, and it is deterministic — the same room gives the same answer twice. It comes back with exactly one of three things.
| What comes back | What it sounds like | What it means | What you say next |
|---|---|---|---|
| A recommendation | One cabinet, which wall, whereabouts, and the reason | It has enough to go on and this is the next move | “Yes, put it in” — or ignore it and do something else |
| A question | Two named options, or a missing fact | There is a real choice here and it will not make it for you | Answer it on the AI Suggestion panel — she can read it out but cannot press its buttons — then ask again |
| Blocked | A short reason, no recommendation | Something in the room stops it going further | Fix the reason with the mouse |
Behind that sentence is AI Suggestion, the same engine as the button on the 3D toolbar, and by default it follows the kitchen-design order: the sink first, then the stove, then the fridge, then the corner, and only after those the gaps. If one of the three is not on the plan yet, the first answer is a question about where it goes, or whether this kitchen has one at all — which is why stage zero settled them with the mouse: a voice call can read those questions out, but not answer them. Switching the order off (Follow the kitchen design order, under ⚙ in the AI Suggestion panel) does not get round that; with none of the three on the walls, it asks which of them you have.
With the sink, stove and fridge in, the next answer on an L is the corner, and the reason governs the rest of the session. The corner is the only position both runs share. Until it is decided neither run has a fixed starting point, so cabinets placed inward from the open ends meet in the middle with an awkward remainder between them — the four-inch gap that becomes a filler nobody planned. Decide the corner and everything else measures out from a known point.
When there is a genuine choice of corner, it hands you the choice rather than taking it.
AI Suggestion names both and asks. It does not pick for you.
This is the one question where the software has no business deciding, because the answer depends on how you use the corner rather than on geometry. Both fit. They cost you different things.
Click the one you want on the AI Suggestion panel and it goes straight into the corner; then ask her again. It will not offer that corner a second time — AI Suggestion never recommends the same corner twice. The corner chapter goes through both, and it is worth two minutes before you answer.
You — “Right. What should I do next?”
Emma — “The sink, range and fridge are in, so it wants the corner settled next. Two options: a square corner cabinet, or a blind corner. That one is your pick — it’s on the AI Suggestion panel.”
You — “Blind corner, then. I want the window wall to keep running.”
One click on the panel: the blind corner along the window wall.
Emma — “Got it — the blind corner is in, so the long run can carry past it. Ask me what’s next whenever you’re ready.”
Note what she did not do: pick the corner for you. She can read AI Suggestion’s question out, but its answers are buttons on the panel, and the choice stays yours. From here on the recommendations are cabinets she can place, and she asks before placing every one: nothing is applied until you agree out loud, and what lands is one step of undo.
The middle of a session is repetitive in the best way. You ask, it recommends, you agree, you ask again. Four or five turns and the base run exists. What makes the loop tolerable rather than infuriating is what happens to the cabinets already there: everything in the room is treated as locked.
Under the recommendation is the same engine that drives AI Design: it works out a plan for your room, then returns the next cabinet from that plan which is not already in it. It never quietly moves something you put in by hand. Drop a 36″ sink base under the window because that is where the plumbing is, and the plan bends round it — which is the difference between one suggestion at a time and a whole-room layout that overwrites your afternoon.
You — “What is next?”
Emma — “A thirty-inch base on wall two, between the blind corner and your sink base — that is the wall with the window and the plumbing. Shall I?”
You — “Yes.”
Emma — “Added the thirty-inch base, B30.”
You — “Keep going. You do not have to ask me every time.”
Emma — “Next is a twenty-four inch base to the right of the sink base. I will still ask — one at a time. In?”
You — “In.”
You — “Can you carry on and do the wall cabinets too?”
Emma — “Yes — the floor is done, so the suggestions move up to the wall cabinets now. Same as before: one at a time, and I ask first.”
That used to be the honest boundary of the whole feature, and it has moved. AI Suggestion finishes the floor first — bases and talls — and then carries on to the wall cabinets: on every wall, or only on the walls you picked if you started it from its button on the 3D toolbar (with Edit 3D on), where Advanced options also set the upper height (Auto, 30, 36 or 42 inches, with a different height on some walls if you need one). Look at each upper rather than just listening to it, though. Window trim, hood height and sight lines are where a wall run goes wrong, and none of them can be heard.
She keeps asking for a yes before each placement even after you have said “keep going,” and that is deliberate. One cabinet per confirmation is what keeps a session recoverable: every change is a single thing you can look at, judge and take back.
Somewhere around the fifth turn you will want something specific: drawers rather than a door, an 18″ base beside the fridge. That is the moment to stop asking what is next and start pointing.
Pointing works by number. Every cabinet and appliance carries one, and it is the number the planner prints on each item in the 2D plan (members also see it in the Items list) — not a private label she invented for the conversation. Ask her to read the list and you get, for each item, the number, the catalogue code and width said the way a person says it (“a thirty-inch base cabinet, B30”, not three letters and two digits), the wall it sits on, and which item is selected.
Then add against it. Every add is a sentence with three parts and no fourth:
“Put a thirty-inch base to the right of number four” is the whole grammar. It maps onto the planner’s own Add Right, so what lands, lands snug against its neighbour with no gap to discover later.
The price is worth stating plainly, because it is the commonest frustration on a first call: there is no absolute-position add. “Put it forty inches along wall two” is not a command and no rephrasing turns it into one. Placement is always relative to something already in the drawing, so the first items come from the mouse — which is why the sink, range and fridge went in by hand in stage zero — and everything after them can be spoken.
Asking for an edit while you are in the 3D view needs the planner’s Edit 3D mode. The tools switch it on themselves rather than refusing, and she mentions it once when that happens, so a cabinet never appears in 3D alongside a silent change of mode. The full command list is in the reference chapter.
This is where voice earns its place — not the grand gestures, but the fiddly two-inch adjustments that otherwise mean selecting, dragging, and checking you did not nudge the neighbour.
The renumbering and the ten-step limit account for most of the confusion on a first session. Neither is a bug; both are obvious once and never again. If a session has gone sideways, the unsticking chapter is the one to read.
The useful version of this feature is not a hands-free kitchen designer. It is a hybrid, and the split stops being subtle after half an hour: the mouse points, the voice repeats. Anything you can see and click is faster to click. Anything you would do eight times in a row is faster to say.
Which leaves the shape of a good session: mouse for walls, selection and anything you want to look at while you decide; voice for repetitive placements, small corrections, the “what is next” loop, and questions you would otherwise open a chapter to answer. In the iPad app, coming soon, the balance shifts, because a finger is a worse pointer than a mouse and a microphone is exactly as good.
Ending a session well takes one sentence, and skipping it is the only way to lose an afternoon in this tool.
Saying “save this” with no name saves over the design you have open — the same thing the save button does. Give it a new name and it saves as something new, leaving the original untouched (a name you have already used saves into that design instead). That second form is the most valuable sentence in the chapter: “save this as Plan B” before you try anything drastic. Undo covers ten changes; a name covers the whole afternoon, and an experiment with the run — cabinets out, drawers in, a filler moved, the corner swapped — uses up ten steps faster than you expect.
Loading is the destructive direction. Opening a saved design replaces everything on screen, so she asks first and offers to save the open work. Take the offer. Both saving and opening need you signed in, and if you are not, you hear that plainly rather than hearing that it worked.
What silence does depends on the mode, but both modes end the call. Fifteen seconds after she stops speaking counts as silence in either one, and a lookup she is still running does not count. A chat call hangs up the moment those fifteen seconds are up. An action call does not: the fifteen seconds only arm the hang-up, and the line closes on the next whole minute of the call — go quiet at 3:20 and it ends at 4:00, go quiet at 3:59 and the fifteen seconds are not up until 4:14, so it ends at 5:00. That is deliberate. In action mode your hands are on the mouse, and the seconds while you drag a cabinet into place are silent by nature, so cutting you off there would be cutting you off mid-work; aligning to the minute gives you up to another minute to speak up while guaranteeing the line never carries on into a new minute. Either way you click Ask Emma again to call back.
Time is charged in blocks, and the two modes differ. Chat runs in five-minute blocks and is free with no daily limit on Pro, Designer and Studio; any other signed-in account gets thirty free minutes a day, resetting on the Toronto calendar day, after which each block uses GH Coins; a guest account gets ten minutes, and then voice stops until the next day. Action mode has no free allowance on any plan — it uses GH Coins from the first minute, in two-minute blocks, and is not available on a guest account — and action mode is what this whole walkthrough has been. A block only renews if you actually spoke during it and spoke within the last minute and a half, so a call you walked away from does not quietly keep going.
One more thing before you talk freely: voice calls are not recorded. The audio goes from your browser straight to the speech provider, never reaches us, and no transcript is kept. Typed conversations are kept. That asymmetry is deliberate, and it is written out on the privacy page.
Twenty-five minutes in, the file contains something real: genuine frameless boxes at catalogue sizes, with full-overlay doors and adjustable feet. The plan is made of things that exist rather than rectangles that approximate them, which is why you cannot accidentally design a 34″ base cabinet that no factory makes. (Pro, Designer and Studio accounts can resize a cabinet on purpose; the planner then marks it — B18*, for instance — and the quote prices it as a modified cabinet, or lists it as a custom item quoted separately when no stock box can be cut to that size — unless the new size happens to be another stock one.)
What you should have on screen:
Then the part no assistant does for you. Neither she nor AI Suggestion has seen your room or met your plumbing. Three checks stand between this file and an order:
Run the layout audit. Let Design check go first — the clipboard button on the 2D toolbar, just before Quote. It measures the working aisles against 42″, flags missing fillers at the walls and inside corners, and checks the room beside the fridge for its door and a dishwasher too close to a corner, all with every door shut. Then open every door in your head — fridge, oven, dishwasher, and every cabinet next to them. Walk the aisles: 42″ where one person cooks, 48″ for two, and 36″ only for a walkway with no cabinet doors facing across it. Find the filler at every wall and every inside corner. The twelve mistakes chapter is the checklist, written for exactly this moment.
Confirm the appliance openings. Against the manufacturer’s rough-opening dimensions for the exact model you are buying — not the marketing width. Chapter reference here.
Get a human to look at it. Ours, or anyone who has installed kitchens. The honest reason is our own limit: AI Suggestion is good at order and adjacency and knows nothing about your building. Her DIY answers are grounded in the written guide on this site, and when the lookup comes back with nothing relevant she says she is not certain and points you at a person rather than inventing an answer. That is the behaviour to want — and the reason the last check is not software.
Next in this cluster: how AI Suggestion decides what to recommend — the kitchen-design order, the corner rule, the locked-items rule, and why it sometimes answers with a question instead.
Draw the walls with the mouse first, because the assistant has no wall tool and a shape is faster to draw than to describe, and put the sink, range and fridge in with the mouse too: AI Suggestion asks about those three first, and its questions are answered on its panel, not by voice. Then switch Emma to Do it for me, start a voice call and ask what you should do next. The planner's step logic answers with one cabinet, which wall and why; you agree, she places it, and you ask again. The corner choice is yours to click on the AI Suggestion panel. Correct anything you do not like by number, then save under a name. The measuring and the final check against a real layout audit stay yours.
You draw them. Walls are the one part of the room the voice assistant has no tool for, and four clicks with a mouse gives an exact rectangle where the spoken version takes four sentences that can each be misheard. If you ask what to do next before any walls exist, the answer is add walls first, which is correct rather than a failure: it cannot recommend a cabinet into a room that does not exist.
Ask what you should do next. That sentence does not go to the language model at all: it runs the planner's own deterministic step logic over your actual layout and comes back with exactly one of three things, a specific recommendation with its reason, a question it needs answered first, or a statement that it is blocked and why. She can read a question out, but you answer it on the AI Suggestion panel. Most of a session is you responding to that.
Because the corner is the position both runs share, and until it is decided neither run has a fixed starting point. Cabinets placed inward from the open ends meet in the middle with an awkward remainder between them. AI Suggestion settles the corner before the runs on an L, after the sink, stove and fridge when it is following the kitchen-design order, which is the default, and when there is a real choice between a square corner cabinet and a blind corner cabinet it hands you that choice as a question with the options named, rather than deciding for you; you click your choice on the AI Suggestion panel. It never recommends the same corner twice.
No. Everything already in the room is treated as locked. AI Suggestion runs the same engine as AI Design, then returns the next cabinet from that plan which is not already in your room, so it designs around your decisions instead of overruling them. A sink base you put under the window by hand stays under the window.
No, and you would not want to. The walls, the sink, range and fridge, and the corner choice are done with the mouse; colours, finishes and countertops are not wired to voice at all; and anything you can see and click is faster to click than to describe. The working posture is a hybrid: mouse for pointing and drawing, voice for repetitive placements, small corrections and questions. Once the floor is done, AI Suggestion moves up to the wall cabinets, and those are the part most worth checking with your eyes rather than your ears.
Say undo. It is the planner's own undo, so it takes back the last change whether she made it or you dragged something by accident. The history is ten changes deep by design, so the browser is not holding a large scene dozens of times over, and anything older than that cannot be undone. That is the reason to save under a name before trying anything drastic.
That depends on the mode. Chat mode, where she answers and looks things up but cannot touch the design, is free with no daily limit on Pro, Designer and Studio accounts; any other signed-in account gets thirty free minutes a day, resetting on the Toronto calendar day, after which chat uses GH Coins, in five-minute blocks, and a guest account gets ten minutes a day, after which voice stops until the next day. Action mode, the one that places and moves cabinets while you talk, has no free allowance on any plan and is not available on a guest account: it uses GH Coins from the first minute, in two-minute blocks. A block only renews if you actually spoke during it and spoke within the last minute and a half, so a call you walked away from does not keep spending. Both modes end on fifteen seconds of silence, counted from when she stops speaking: a chat call hangs up on the spot, while an action call waits and closes on the next whole minute of the call, so going quiet at 3:20 ends it at 4:00.
No. What you have is a plan made of real catalogue cabinets at sizes that exist, which is a far better starting point than a sketch, but neither she nor AI Suggestion has seen your room. Before ordering, walk the plan through a layout audit with every door opened in your head, confirm every appliance opening against the manufacturer's rough-opening dimensions for the exact model, and have a human who has installed kitchens look at it.
Twenty minutes with a tape measure, four clicks for the room, a minute for the sink, range and fridge, then one sentence out loud. Everything after that is yes, left of, right of, and undo.
Open the 3D planner →