Smart Templates, an exclusive new feature from draw.io

You don’t have to look far to see how AI is driving innovation in the tech world, and making lives easier for software users. We’re putting machine-learning to work for our customers with draw.io’s new feature, Smart Templates, which uses AI to automatically generate custom templates quickly and easily. The Smart Templates feature is live, and any team with a Cloud license can try it out today. Want to see it for yourself? Just start a free evaluation of draw.io on the Atlassian Marketplace.

A smarter way to look at templates

Other visualization apps have taken to view diagramming templates as an arms race; the app with the most templates wins. But, that’s not how Team draw.io views things, and we don’t think that’s how our customers feel either. Teams don’t want 30,000 templates, they just want the right template.

That was the genesis for Smart Templates. Instead of adding template after template to our library, we want to give our users the fastest way possible to start diagramming. That means finding the right template faster, and what better way to achieve that than to build it instantly with the help of AI.

How it works

On the template selection screen inside draw.io for Cloud there is a now an item in the left hand menu for “Smart Template”. Clicking that will open the Smart Template screen, which has a simple text entry box, and a dropdown for choosing the kind of diagram you want.

In the text box, describe the type of diagram you want. Feel free to be as detailed as you like, because the more you add, the more the AI will be able to consider when constructing your template. You might say something like, “An emergency management flowchart for troubleshooting a power failure”, or “a swimlane diagram that describes the onboarding process of a new software engineer”. Once you’ve described your template, use the dropdown menu to select the type of diagram you want. Then, press “generate”, and allow draw.io to work its magic. In a short time, a diagram will appear in the preview window. You can choose to insert that template as-is, or you can ask draw.io to generate a new template; even keeping the parameters the same, an iteration of the template will appear.

Once you choose “Insert”, you can work with the diagram like usual, formatting colors, text, connectors etc. until you are satisfied. Was the template generated perfectly? Great! Save it as a custom template, and use it again in the future. Need to try again? No problem, you can always access the templates from the “plus” menu and generate a new template.

See it yourself at Team ’23

We are excited for users to get their hands on Smart Templates, and we’ll be demoing the feature at our booth next week at Atlassian Team ’23. Will you be in Las Vegas for the event? Be sure to stop by our booth, located near the Expo Hall entrance, to get a first-hand look. If you’re missing out on Team ’23, you can still try out these AI-driven templates yourself, even if you’re not a customer; just start a free 30-day evaluation and start building templates today.