Five quite different things are being sold as “talk to AI and design your kitchen.” Four of them cannot see your kitchen, which turns out to be the only question that matters.
Voice arrived in home design the way it arrives everywhere: as a feature bullet, attached to five incompatible things at once. A smart speaker that can tell you standard counter height. A chatbot with a microphone button. A dictation box that turns speech into a command. And, newly, an assistant that is actually wired into the drawing in front of you. They are not competitors — they are different tools with one interface in common, and the disappointment comes from expecting one and being handed another.
Five different things get called voice home design: smart speakers, chatbot voice modes, plain dictation, photo-render apps, and an assistant built into the planner itself. Only the last one can see your actual plan and change it. The rest can describe a kitchen convincingly, but none of them can move a cabinet or check a clearance.
Sort any product you are looking at into one of these before judging it. The sorting question is simple: can it read the state of your actual plan?
What they search “talk to AI and design my kitchen” — hoping for the fifth, and finding the third.
This is not about model quality. The best conversational model in the world, given no access to your plan, hits the same four walls:
Which is why the honest use for a general chatbot in a renovation is education, not design: what a blind corner is, whether you want drawers under the hob, how deep a fridge really is. Excellent teacher. Not a draughtsman.
The obvious version of this feature is a microphone that types for you: say “add a thirty-inch base”, and a thirty-inch base appears. We built exactly that, and it lived in the designer’s side panel for months before we took it out.
Three things killed it. It only understood a script, so anybody who said it differently got nothing. It only worked in one view, so it evaporated the moment you looked at your kitchen in 3D. And most tellingly — the questions people actually asked out loud were never commands. They were “why can’t I…”, “what is this”, “is that going to fit”. A command parser has no answer to any of those.
People do not want to operate software by voice. They want to ask about what they are operating by hand. Design for the question, not the command.
That is still the rule our assistant is built on. She can make changes too — in an editing call that you switch on and pay for, she adds a cabinet beside another, nudges one a few inches, takes one out or undoes the last change — but from an ordinary sentence rather than a script, and one item at a time.
If you are evaluating one — ours or anybody else’s — these five are the ones that separate a demo from a tool you keep using.
That last one is the one nobody asks about and everybody notices later. Live voice is billed by the minute somewhere down the stack, and a design session is mostly silence — long stretches of dragging cabinets with nothing to say. An assistant that holds the line open through all of it is spending your money to hear you breathe.
| Task | Better by voice | Better by hand |
|---|---|---|
| “What is this thing called?” | Yes — instant, in context | Searching help for a word you do not know |
| “Why won’t this move?” | Yes — it reads the state | Trial and error |
| “What should I do next?” | Yes — one step at a time | Staring at a blank wall |
| Placing a cabinet at an exact inch | Only as a nudge — “three inches left”, in an editing call | Click the gap number and type the distance |
| Choosing a colour | No — it cannot see | Your own eyes on a render |
| Entering measured wall lengths | No — too costly to mishear | Type them |
| Learning the trade vocabulary | Yes — this is its best trick | The glossary, more slowly |
The pattern is consistent: voice is for understanding, hands are for precision. Any product that asks you to do precision work by voice has the split backwards.
She reads a written summary of the live plan — view, walls, ceiling heights, the selected item with its code, size, wall and height off the floor, overlap warnings, your last few edits — so “this one” works. Ask what to do next and the answer comes from the planner’s own step logic rather than the model’s imagination; on an editing call she reads it out, asks, and places it only if you say yes. Put the sink, range and fridge in with the mouse first, and pick the corner cabinet in the AI Suggestion panel when the planner asks: those questions she can pass on, but not settle for you.
Design in the planner is free — as a guest with no account, or with a free sign-in — and typing to her is free: right-click Ask Emma, and every question you type carries that live summary with it, so it is the place to start with “why won’t this move?”. Live voice needs you signed in or in guest mode, plus microphone permission, and comes in two modes. Just talk, the default — she answers and looks things up in this guide, but cannot see or touch the design — is free with no daily limit on Pro, Designer and Studio and thirty free minutes a day on any other account, after which it uses GH Coins; a guest account gets ten minutes a day, and then voice stops until the next day, because a guest cannot hold GH Coins. That call hangs up after fifteen seconds of silence, and you click Ask Emma again to call back. Do it for me is the one that reads the plan and edits it — choose it at the top of her panel, or ask for a change during a chat and confirm the card that appears. It has no free allowance, uses GH Coins from the first minute, and needs a signed-in account rather than a guest one. It ends on the same fifteen seconds of silence, except the hang-up waits for the next whole minute of the call, so that the silent seconds while you drag a cabinet into place do not cut the call off mid-work.
On the “first” question, since people ask: at the time of writing we do not know of another free kitchen planner you can hold an actual conversation with while you design — plenty of tools have chatbots, and plenty of assistants can talk about kitchens, but a free planner whose assistant you can talk to out loud, wired into the live plan, is one we have not found elsewhere. If you find one, we would genuinely like to know.
Yes, but check which kind you are talking to. A general assistant can discuss kitchens brilliantly and cannot see yours, so it can teach but not design. An assistant built into a planner can read your live plan, explain what you are looking at and place the recommended next cabinet when you agree. Only the second kind can answer “why won’t this fit”.
Ours is free to design in, as a guest with no account or with a free sign-in, and its assistant can be typed to for free, with your live plan attached to every question. 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 account, after which it uses GH Coins; a guest gets ten minutes a day, and then voice stops until the next day, because a guest cannot hold GH Coins. On a call, letting her see and edit the design has no free allowance, uses GH Coins from the first minute, and is not available on a guest account. We have not found another free planner offering spoken conversation tied to the live design, though the field moves quickly.
It has no access to your plan, no cabinet catalogue, no dimensions and no screen to show you the result. It can answer general questions like standard counter height, which is genuinely useful during a renovation, but it cannot make a design decision about a room it cannot see.
For precision, no — a mouse is a precision instrument and speech is not. Command-style voice control has largely failed in design tools because it only understands scripted phrasing while the questions people ask out loud are open-ended. Conversation about the design works far better than dictating instructions to it.
It depends entirely on the product, so it is worth checking. In ours a chat-only call ends after fifteen seconds of silence and you click the Ask Emma button again to call back; a call where she is editing the design ends on the same fifteen seconds, except 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, because the seconds while you drag a cabinet into place are silent by nature. The button lights up green while a call is live, so you can see when nothing is being sent.
The questions that need your screen: what is this, why will it not move, what should I do next, does this fit on this wall. Save measurements and precise placement for your hands. There is a phrasebook here.
Free 3D planner, no signup to start drawing — press Try it as a guest. The assistant is the speech-bubble Ask Emma button in the 2D toolbar — click it to talk, or right-click it to type.
Open the 3D planner →