Both hands are on the mouse. You do not know what the cabinet is called. The question you want to ask takes four seconds out loud and four minutes to find in a help page — so ask it out loud.
Every piece of kitchen design software has the same silence in it. You are dragging a cabinet, something turns red, and there is nobody to ask. So you stop, open a help page, and try to guess what the thing you are looking at is called — which is hard, because not knowing what it is called is the entire problem. Voice fixes that particular silence better than any menu ever has: you say “why won’t this go where I want it” and keep your hands where they were.
Yes, but only with an assistant wired into the planner itself — a general chatbot cannot see your plan. In the Flip designer, on a Do it for me call, the voice assistant reads your live design and can list items, highlight one, add a cabinet beside an existing one, slide it along its wall by an inch amount, change a wall cabinet’s height, remove, undo and save. Plumbing, gas and structure stay your decision.
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:
What they search at midnight “kitchen design software help” — at the exact moment they cannot describe the problem in words the help page uses.
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 — with every message you type to her, and whenever she asks on a Do it for me voice call — the planner hands her a short written statement of the current state:
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.”
The one kind of call that gets none of this is a Just talk call. It is for questions about kitchens and the planner in general, answered from this guide, and it cannot see your design at all. So anything below about your own layout is a job for the typing panel, which is free, or for a Do it for me call.
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.
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:
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.
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. There are two kinds of call, and they behave differently: a chat call (Just talk in her panel), where she answers questions and looks things up but cannot see or touch the design, hangs up after fifteen seconds of silence — click Ask Emma again to call back. A hands-on call (Do it for me), the paid one where she adds, moves and saves things for you, ends on the same fifteen seconds — only the hang-up waits for the next whole minute of the call.
Unlit means she is not listening and nothing is being spent. Lit green means the microphone is live. In 3D, where the toolbar button is out of sight, the small status bubble in the corner does the same job, and pressing the mouse on the canvas fades it out of your way — the seconds when you are actually placing a cabinet are the seconds she should not be in your field of view.
Fifteen seconds without a word ends a hands-on call too, but the hang-up does not land the moment the silence comes due: it waits for the next whole minute of the call. Go quiet at 3:20 and the call 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. Your hands are on the mouse in this mode, and the seconds while you drag a cabinet into place are silent by nature — cutting you off there would be cutting you off mid-work. Aligning the hang-up to the minute gives you up to another minute to speak up, while guaranteeing the line never carries on into a new minute.
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. Just talking is free with no daily limit on Pro, Designer and Studio; every other signed-in account gets thirty free minutes a day, and after that chat uses GH Coins. A guest account gets ten minutes a day, and then voice stops until the next day — a guest account cannot hold GH Coins. Letting her edit the design has no free allowance at all — it uses GH Coins from the first minute, and it is not available on a guest account. Typing to her is free, signed in or as a guest, and is always there as the fallback.
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.
You can do a great deal of it by talking, but not all of it, and the difference matters. On a Do it for me call, voice is excellent at explaining what you are looking at, naming things, diagnosing why something will not move, and recommending and placing the next cabinet. It is poor at precise placement and cannot judge how the room looks. The realistic workflow is hands on the mouse, questions out loud.
Our 3D kitchen planner is free to design in — as a guest with no account, or with a free Google, Apple or email-code sign-in — and Emma, the assistant inside it, can be typed to for free. Live voice needs you signed in or in guest mode, plus microphone permission. Just talking to her is free with no daily limit on Pro, Designer and Studio, and thirty free minutes a day on any other signed-in account, after which it uses GH Coins; a guest account gets ten minutes a day, and then voice stops until the next day. Letting her edit the design has no free allowance, uses GH Coins from the first minute, and needs a signed-in account rather than a guest one.
In our case it is handed a short written summary of the design straight from the planner, with every typed message and on a Do it for me voice call — current view, walls and ceiling heights, cabinet count, the selected item with its code, size, wall and height off the floor, any overlap warnings, your recent edits and the last message shown to you. It is not a screenshot and no image model is involved, so the numbers she quotes are the real ones rather than an interpretation of a picture. A Just talk call gets no summary: it answers general questions from the guide.
It depends on the kind of call. On a Just talk call she cannot change anything. On a Do it for me call she changes only what you ask for in that sentence — add a cabinet beside another, slide one, change a wall cabinet’s height, remove, undo, save or open a design — one item at a time, and each cabinet change is one undoable step. Ask what to do next and she reads you the planner’s one recommendation, then places it only if you say yes. She will not invent cabinets, resize them, or change anything you did not ask for.
It depends which kind of call you are on. A chat call — questions only, nothing touched — hangs up after fifteen seconds of silence, and you click Ask Emma again to call back. On a call where she is editing the design the same fifteen seconds ends it, but the hang-up waits for 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. The seconds while you drag a cabinet into place are silent by nature, so aligning the hang-up to the minute leaves you room to speak up before the line closes. The Ask Emma button shows which state you are in: unlit means nothing is being sent.
English, Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese and French, and she will follow whichever of those you use — speak Cantonese and she replies in Cantonese. There is no language menu to set on the website.
For questions, comprehension and next steps, considerably. For putting a specific cabinet at a specific inch, no — a mouse is a precision instrument and speech is not. Treat voice as the thing that removes the interruptions, not as a replacement for the drawing itself.
No. The planner and the voice both run in the browser on your computer. Voice asks for microphone permission the first time, which you can decline — the typing panel needs no microphone, only a sign-in or a guest session.
Draw a wall, drop a cabinet, then right-click Ask Emma in the 2D toolbar and ask why it went where it went — typed, it is free, and she sees the same design a Do it for me call does.
Open the 3D planner →