AI Chat

HVAKR AI answers HVAC and product questions, and it also does work. Open inside a project, it can read the project, run the calculator, save studies, take off spaces, group zones, place equipment, route and size ducts, and generate exports. The larger changes stop for your approval first — see Approving Actions.

Accessing AI Chat

AI Chat is available on plans with AI access. Without it, the AI entry points are hidden.

From a Project

While working in a project:

Click AI in the top toolbar (or press Cmd/Ctrl + J)
The AI drawer opens on the right
The drawer header has Open in full screen, Chat History, and New Chat
An empty chat shows three prompt suggestions for the page you have open, picked at random — click one to send it. For example, Spaces suggests space takeoff and space type tasks, and Loads suggests load reviews. Pages without their own suggestions show general project suggestions. On a commercial project, when your organization has the IAQP feature enabled, the first suggestion on Space Types, Loads, and Ventilation is always Compare VRP vs IAQP (see VRP vs IAQP Comparison)

The separate Chat button in the toolbar is for project comments and collaboration — not AI Chat.

Full-Screen View

For a full-screen chat outside a project:

From the home screen, click HVAKR AI in the left sidebar
An empty chat opens with three prompt suggestions above the composer, picked at random — click one to send it
Use Show History in the header to open the conversation sidebar, or New Chat to start over

When a chat is tied to a project, the project name appears as a tag in the header. Click it to reopen the same conversation inside that project.

What HVAKR AI Can Do

The available actions depend on where the chat runs. The chat is either project-scoped (opened from inside a project, or created one during the conversation) or home-scoped.

In Any Chat

Answer questions — about HVAC concepts, ASHRAE procedures, your results, or how HVAKR works. It reads this documentation site and the HVAKR knowledge base, and cites the page it answered from.
Search your projects and templates — find a project by name or content, or find space, envelope, and system templates to import.
Read attachments — PDFs, Excel, Word, CSVs, and images on vision-capable models.
Navigate the app — jump you to the page it is talking about.
Draw charts — line, bar, area, and donut charts, plus a psychrometric chart, rendered inline in the conversation.
Search the web — only when Web search is on in chat settings.

From the Home Screen

Without a project open, HVAKR AI can create a project. Describe the building in plain language:

“Create a 10,000 sq ft office building in Chicago with 20 offices, 3 conference rooms, and a break room”

Attach floor plan PDFs and it uploads them to the new project’s sheet library as part of the same request. Once the project exists, the conversation becomes project-scoped and the actions below become available.

Inside a Project

Ask for	What HVAKR AI does
Project data	Reads spaces, zones, systems, envelope, weather, and settings
Load calculations	Runs the HVAKR calculator; it can also test a change and report the impact without saving it
A study	Saves the proposed change as a named study beside the baseline, calculates it, and compares the two
A project review	Checks structural completeness, calculation sanity, and design quality, and reports findings
Floor plan upload	Uploads attached PDFs to the sheet library, runs OCR, and places sheets on levels
Space takeoff	Detects spaces from placed sheets and satellite maps, and can assign envelope types in the same run
Zoning	Groups spaces into zones
Project edits	Changes any project data — space properties, envelope assignments, airflow overrides, settings
Equipment	Places central and terminal units
Duct design	Routes ducts and sizes them against your duct types
Reports and schedules	Generates a PDF report or CSV schedule and waits for it to finish — see Reports

Space takeoff run from the chat writes the detected spaces straight into the model once you approve it. It does not use the include/exclude review of the Auto Takeoff Spaces toolbar action.

On long procedures — a project built end to end from floor plans, for example — HVAKR AI stops at each stage to confirm the result before it continues.

Studies

Ask a sensitivity question — “how does the cooling setpoint affect peak load?”, “what if we used triple-pane glass?” — and HVAKR AI answers it with a study rather than by editing the project:

It reads the entities the change touches and calculates the baseline
It saves the change as a named study, for example Cooling setpoint 78°F
It calculates that study and reports baseline vs study — the values, the delta, the sizing scope that moves most, and any shift in peak hour or month

The study is a real project study, so it stays after the answer. Open it from the Studies switcher in the project toolbar. While a study is open, a banner names it and states that changes do not apply to the project, until you click Exit Study. Rename, apply, or delete the study from its ⋯ menu in the switcher. A report or schedule generated while the study is open renders from the study instead of the baseline.

A study holds the calculator inputs — spaces, zones, systems, equipment, envelope and space types, the duct graph, and project settings — plus duct and register types. It cannot change the project name, sheets, annotations, dashboards, deadlines, or comments; ask for those as a normal project edit.

To make a study’s change real, open the Studies switcher, choose Apply Changes from that study’s ⋯ menu, and confirm Apply Changes. The study does not need to be open. The project takes on the study’s changes, then the study is deleted. If that study was open, HVAKR returns you to the project. Undo restores both the project and the study. You can also ask HVAKR AI to make the same edit on the baseline project.

For a throwaway number — sweeping several values before you pick one — HVAKR AI tests the change without saving a study at all.

VRP vs IAQP Comparison

On a commercial project, ask HVAKR AI to compare VRP with IAQP, or click the Compare VRP vs IAQP suggestion. It keeps your current inputs and equipment and never changes the baseline:

It checks that every space is left on the default Ventilation Rate Procedure — if any space has a ventilation method set, even VRP, it names those spaces and stops. Only spaces whose space type has contaminant emission rates can be evaluated
It calculates the baseline, ranks those spaces by cooling ventilation load, and picks the fewest that cover at least 80% of it — or the spaces you name
It switches them to IAQP, keeps only the spaces whose outdoor air drops, and saves the result as a study named IAQP comparison
It reports baseline vs study design outdoor air and peak cooling and heating loads, and lists high-load spaces it could not evaluate because they have no emission rates

If no space has emission rates, or no space’s outdoor air drops, it explains why and saves no study. These are calculated loads, not a compliance check — open the study to review its detailed IAQP results, or generate the IAQP Ventilation Summary report.

Example Prompts

Questions:

“What is the difference between sensible and latent load?”
“How does ASHRAE 62.1 calculate ventilation?”
“Why does this space have the highest load?”
“Explain the peak hour for Zone 1”
“What space type should I use for a server room?”

Work:

“Detect the spaces on level 2 and group them into zones”
“Set the ceiling height to 10 ft in every office”
“What happens to the cooling load if I switch the glazing to a double-pane low-e window?”
“Check this project and tell me what’s missing”
“Generate the load calculation report”

Composer Controls

Control	What it does
Paperclip	Attach files. Hover for the supported types and size limit of the current model. You can also paste a screenshot.
Sliders	Chat settings — Mode (Ask or Auto) and the Web search toggle
Reasoning	Signal-bar icon — pick how hard the chosen model thinks, from its supported effort levels. Only shown when a specific model is picked; Auto hides it.
Model	Pick the model for this chat, or leave it on Auto and HVAKR picks one for the task
Credit ring	Share of this month’s included credits used. Hover for the credits used in this chat.
Microphone	Start voice conversation — talk to HVAKR AI instead of typing. See Voice Conversations.
Up arrow / Stop	Send the message. While the AI is working, the same button becomes a red Stop.

Web search is off by default. The model list groups models by provider — Frontier (curated flagship picks), then Claude, GPT, Gemini, SpaceXSI, Open Models, and Other — and hovering a model shows its Speed, Intelligence, and Cost as rating bars, plus its default Reasoning effort. If your Enterprise organization requires zero data retention (ZDR) models under Settings > Organization > AI Model Access, the list tags those models ZDR.

Voice Conversations

Click the Microphone button in the composer to talk to HVAKR AI. The browser asks for microphone access the first time. Voice runs in the current chat — start it from a project drawer and the conversation stays project-scoped, with the same tools, approvals, and Undo as typed messages. With no chat open yet, starting voice creates one; the button is disabled with Send or clear the draft to start voice while unsent text or attachments would be lost by that switch.

While voice is running, a bar appears at the bottom center of the screen and stays there even if you close the AI drawer:

Control	What it does
AI	Reopens the AI chat the voice conversation belongs to
Status	Connecting…, Listening, Working…, Speaking…, Microphone muted, or Ending…, beside a waveform of your voice and the reply
Mute	Mutes your microphone; click Unmute to resume. Muting does not pause credit usage.
End	Ends the voice conversation. A response already running finishes in the chat.

Each spoken request is sent as a message in the chat, so the reply streams in the AI drawer while voice reads it back. Actions that need approval in Ask mode still stop — say which pending action you approve or deny, or click the approval in the chat. Say stop to cancel a running response. Voice ends when you switch to another chat or change Mode, the model, Reasoning, or Web search; start it again to use the new settings. Voice conversations end after 30 minutes.

Voice spends AI credits by the minute in addition to the model usage of the work it delegates. Voice is not offered in Enterprise organizations that require zero data retention (ZDR) or turn off the OpenAI provider under Settings > Organization > AI Model Access; typed chat still works with any allowed model.

Approving Actions

Mode controls whether HVAKR AI pauses before it makes a large change:

Ask (default) — the actions listed below stop for your approval
Auto — the AI runs them without stopping

In Ask mode, these actions request approval: space takeoff, zoning, equipment placement, duct routing, duct sizing, importing templates into the project, and any project edit that deletes data or changes more than one field. A card appears above the composer with the proposed change and Approve / Deny buttons. If an approved action is interrupted before it finishes, the card comes back with a single Retry.

Approval is not a gate on every write. A single-field edit — renaming a space, setting one property — applies without a prompt, as do sheet uploads, study creation, and export generation. A study never changes the baseline project, so it is not gated.

After the AI edits project data, the response ends with a N changes applied callout. Expand it to see exactly what changed, then click Keep or Undo. The callout covers project-data edits; it does not roll back a takeoff, zoning pass, equipment placement, or duct run — approve or deny those on the card instead.

HVAKR AI also asks plain questions when a choice is yours to make — the options appear as buttons above the composer, plus a Something else row for typing your own answer in the composer and a Skip button to dismiss the question.

Plan

On multi-step work, HVAKR AI keeps a Plan panel above the composer. It shows each step with its status, a completed/total count, and the step it is on now. Expand it to see the whole list. Clear the plan with the ✕ button once the AI has stopped.

Conversation History

In the project drawer, open the Chat History menu from the header icon
In the full-screen view, toggle Show History to open the history sidebar

Chats are listed most recent first. Click one to resume it, or use its ⋯ menu to Rename or Delete it. New Chat starts a fresh conversation.

Response Actions

Every finished response has Copy, Good Response, and Bad Response buttons. Ratings go to the HVAKR team as feedback. They do not train a model and do not change the answers you get next.

Credits

Each turn spends AI credits from your organization’s pool. Included credits refill monthly; on-demand credits cover the overflow. See Organization Settings for balances and spending limits.

Limitations

Verify Before You Rely On It

Check important numbers against the calculator output
Apply your own engineering judgment
Read the standard directly for compliance questions

You Stay In Control

Leave Mode on Ask so the larger actions stop for approval
Use Undo on the applied-changes callout when a project edit is not what you wanted
Press Stop to end a run in progress
Smaller edits apply without a prompt, so read the response before moving on

Best Practices

Be Specific

Instead of: “Help with my project” Try: “Why is the conference room heating load so high?”

Provide Context

Name the space, zone, or system you mean, and say what you already tried.

Attach the Source

Attach the floor plan, spec, or schedule instead of describing it — the AI reads the file directly.