Reading a plan and measuring it are two different jobs. This page covers the first: an AI read of a sheet, and the room or count proposals it and two free tools can offer. A proposal is a suggestion, not a measurement. Nothing here writes a room, a quantity or a total on its own; you review it and say yes or no.
Read this page
Open a page and choose Read this page. AI assist then says what it read: the sheet number, the sheet title and the discipline from the title block, and the room labels it found, the first twelve of them with a count of the rest. A page that turns out to be a floor plan or an elevation gets outlined in the page rail, and the rail's filter can narrow the set down to just those pages.
If a printed scale can be read from the page, it lands the same way a text-layer detection already does: unconfirmed, behind the scale banner, with a note that AI supplied the reading. Confirm it if it matches the sheet, or use Find Scale if it does not.
Read all pages, and the cost
Read all pages offers every unread page on the plan in one pass. Before it runs, a confirm step says how many pages are still unread, what the batch would cost, and what is left of this month's AI allowance, so you decide before anything is spent. Every AI control on the takeoff shows this estimate first and the settled token usage after. When the allowance runs out partway through a plan, the pages already read keep their result, and the rest wait for the allowance to reset or for a bigger plan.
Three ways to propose a room
Room proposals come from three tools, cheapest first.
- Printed labels. Free. Pairs a room's printed name with its printed dimension string and draws the rectangle those feet describe.
- Detect. Free. Click anywhere inside a room and a flood fill runs out to the walls around your click and traces the outline for you. A door opening can let it leak; the proposal says so.
- AI with a grid. Metered. Sends a labelled grid over the page and asks the model to outline every room it can see.
None of the three draws a finished room on the sheet. Every one lands in the Proposals tab first.
The Proposals tab: confirm or discard
The Proposals tab sits beside the sheet, so selecting a proposal frames it there. Confirm and Discard decide what happens to it next.
Confirming an area proposal makes a room, the same as Make room does for a measurement you drew by hand. A proposal that came from printed labels becomes a rectangle room from the printed feet and needs no scale to do it. A proposal that came from Detect or from AI needs the page's scale confirmed first; once it is, confirming makes a polygon room from the outline. When the scale is not confirmed yet, the measurement is still confirmed, and Make room is offered again once you set the scale.
Discard removes a proposal for good, so look it over before you choose.
Symbol search, from the Count tool
Inside the Count tool, Search boxes one symbol. Box the symbol as tightly as you can. Keep surrounding text and dimension lines out of the box. One symbol per box. Zoom in first so the example is clean.
The search comes back with direct matches and possible matches, each with a checkbox: direct matches start checked, possible matches do not. Create Count lands the checked matches as one count proposal in the group you chose. Confirm count turns that proposal into a real count.
When the search finds fewer than two candidates, Ask AI to find matches offers the model instead, with its own token estimate. Nothing lands from it until you choose Create Count.
What a proposal can never do
A proposal that has not been confirmed never feeds a group total, a room's quantity, the Takeoff Summary, a CSV row or the marked-up PDF. The row reads "proposal" in place of a number, its group reads "unconfirmed" with the reason attached, and the sheet leaves it out, until a person confirms it. That is what keeps a guess from ever quietly becoming a quantity you build from.
AI is here to assist you and is not a substitute for your judgment. Check your work and make sure every material is accounted for.