Meet the chat assistant: talk to your drawing set
We built construction.ai to get useful data out of drawing packages. Today we’re shipping the other half of that promise: a chat assistant that reads your drawing set with you — and talks about it like somebody who’s actually stood on a jobsite. It’s live now at chat.construction.ai.
Here’s the workflow. Upload your PDF drawing package. Set your scale and units — the assistant reads the title block and the scale bar, then asks you to confirm before it measures a thing. Pick up to 25 sheets: your discipline’s plans, the schedule sheet where the totals live, the legend, and one overall plan for orientation. Tell it your trade and it’ll recommend the lineup. Then ask questions in plain language, or export clean tables and CSVs.
What kind of questions? The ones you’re already answering by hand at 10pm. How many water closets on Level 1. What’s in the door schedule that isn’t on the plans. Slab area for the north wing, with the formula shown and every input tagged by source. Counts are symbol-accurate — it reads the legend before it counts anything, keeps filled, open and half-filled symbols as separate types, and leaves grid bubbles, keynotes and section callouts out of the tally. Every quantity gets a MasterFormat tag, marked as found on the drawing or inferred.
The part we’re proudest of is what it won’t do. It won’t report a scaled measurement before you confirm the scale. It won’t blend printed dimensions with scaled estimates without labelling which is which. It won’t pick a side when the fixture schedule and the plan disagree — it flags the mismatch and tells you which sheet probably holds the missing answer. And when a scan is too rough to read, it says “I can’t read that” instead of guessing. A confident wrong number costs real money on a job site, so this assistant is built to confirm, cite and caveat — not to sound clever.
It’s trade-aware, too. Tell it you’re bidding the mechanical scope and it stops offering you door schedules — and it flags the structural sleeve sitting in the path of your pipe run, because cross-trade catches are worth knowing early.
None of this replaces your estimator, your takeoff service, or your judgment. It’s a fast first pass that shows its work, so you can spot-check the total and get back to the decisions that actually need you. Upload a set at chat.construction.ai and put a foreman on your PDFs.