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.
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 | No | Mouse, every time |
| 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; she reads it out, asks, and places it only if you say yes.
Design in the planner is free with no signup, and typing to her is free and anonymous. Live voice needs a signed-in account and microphone permission; each account gets ten minutes of it to try, after which voice runs on GH Coin like the other AI extras. She hangs up after five quiet minutes, and while she is on standby the microphone stays open but nothing leaves your computer.
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 the combination of free, spoken, and 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 with no signup, and its assistant can be typed to free and anonymously. Live voice requires a signed-in account and microphone permission, with ten minutes per account to try it, after which voice runs on GH Coin like the other AI extras. 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 the call closes after five minutes of silence; after that the microphone stays open but nothing is uploaded, since the page only measures the level locally to know when you start speaking again, and after about twenty quiet minutes it releases the microphone. The avatar shows the state, 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, is there enough room. Save measurements and precise placement for your hands. There is a phrasebook here.
Free 3D planner, no signup to start drawing. The assistant is the small avatar in the corner — click her and ask.
Open the 3D planner →