What your assistant can draw

Vizspect gives your assistant a toolkit aimed at one thing (clean, USPTO-style patent figures) and applies the house style to everything it produces. Here’s what it can build.

Block and component diagrams

Boxes (plain, rounded, or oval) connected with arrows: the standard patent block diagram of named components and the flow between them. The assistant places and aligns the boxes and routes the connectors around obstacles, so an arrow doesn’t cut through a box that sits in its path.

Flowcharts

Full method and process flowcharts: a stadium START and END, rectangular step boxes, and decision diamonds with labelled YES / NO branches that route cleanly, loop-backs included. Ask for the whole chart at once and Vizspect lays out the steps, branches, and numbering in one step. (A method claim makes a natural flowchart; see Prompting for quality.)

Swimlane charts

Process flows split across lanes (actors, components, or subsystems) with lane headers, dividers, and steps that connect across lanes. Useful for showing which part of a system performs each step.

Timing and waveform diagrams

Digital timing diagrams: each signal drawn from a simple pattern of highs, lows, and clock cycles, stacked and aligned, for figures that show signals over time.

Free-form line art

When a figure doesn’t fit a template, the assistant draws with lines, polylines, and closed outlines: arbitrary shapes, partitions, and annotations.

Reference numerals and lead lines

Reference numbers with lead lines to the parts they label, placed collision-aware: the numeral slides along the part’s edge and the leader grows (up to the house limit) until it points cleanly without crossing another line or box. Numbers follow the house scheme: figure-based, stepped by two, with letter suffixes for repeated parts. See House style & USPTO conventions.

Standard Visio shapes when they fit

For a shape a hand-drawn primitive doesn’t capture well, the assistant can drop a standard Visio master (the flowchart Decision diamond, Process, Document, Database, and others) and bring it into the house style automatically.

Checking and rendering

• Render: at any point, ask the assistant to render the page to an image so you can review it without switching to Visio.
• Compliance check: a read-only geometry check that flags out-of-margin shapes, overlaps, lines crossing shapes, leaders that run too long or cross each other, and reference numbers stranded by a part that moved. Run it before you call a figure done. (Assistants also know it by its tool name, “lint”.)

What it’s not

Vizspect draws black-and-white line art for utility-patent figures. It isn’t a photo editor, a CAD package, or a colour-illustration tool, by design, because that’s what the USPTO expects. The conventions it applies are configurable in Style settings, not by asking in the prompt; see House style & USPTO conventions.