An AI assistant inside Solid Edge

Parts and features

Sketches, extrudes and cuts, revolves, sweeps, lofts, holes and threads, fillets, chamfers, shells, drafts, patterns and mirrors are built with your CAD system's own features, so the result has an ordinary tree you can edit. To change a value later, name the feature and say what should change - no delete and rebuild.

Try: “Create a 120 x 80 x 15 mm plate, add four Ø9 mm through holes 15 mm in from each corner, then tell me the volume and bounding box”

Geometry read back, not assumed

Replies carry numbers measured by the CAD system: volume, bounding box, where a sketch plane really landed, and per-edge evidence for every fillet. A cut that removed nothing shows up as a zero volume change, and a fillet point that matches no edge is refused with the nearest real edges named.

Try: “Add an R8 fillet to the four cut-end edges at these world midpoints, and report the per-edge evidence and the volume change”

Sheet metal and flat patterns

Base flanges, edge and contour flanges, hems, jogs and corner breaks, then the flat pattern and a DXF for the laser. The flat patterns of a whole folder of parts can be nested onto stock sheets.

Try: “Create a new sheet metal part with a 200 x 120 mm base flange, 2 mm thick, add a 40 mm edge flange along the long front edge, and export the flat pattern to DXF”

Surfaces and splines by poles

Offset, extend, trim and thicken surfaces, and extrude or revolve an open profile as a surface instead of a solid. Give a spline as a NURBS - control poles, degree and knots - and each CAD system builds the same curve, instead of interpolating fit points its own way.

Solid Edge: a planar surface from boundary curves is not available.

Try: “Create a spline from these control poles as a NURBS: degree 3, clamped knots [0,0,0,0,1,1,1,1], poles [[0,0],[30,60],[60,-20],[90,40]]”

Parameters, materials and properties

List, create and change named parameters and equations with each CAD system's own mechanism. Assign a material and get the mass, set colours and transparency, and fill in custom properties.

Try: “Create a parameter "Thickness" set to 15 mm, drive the extrusion depth from it, then assign 6061-T6 aluminium and tell me the mass”

A part from a drawing, a PDF, a photo or a mesh

Point it at a dimensioned drawing - DXF, DWG, a vector PDF or a scan - and the printed dimensions set the scale; the reply compares the volume it expected with what the CAD built. A photo gives a proportional model scaled from one dimension you supply, and it is labelled as exactly that. STL and OBJ meshes import as a solid or as a mesh body.

Try: “Build a part from C:\ref\bracket.pdf and tell me the expected and the measured volume”

Design for manufacture and mould tooling

Score a part against machining, sheet-metal, injection-moulding, casting, 3D-printing or welding rules, and get a Word report with screenshots. Draft analysis, parting lines and core and cavity splits are available too, with the differences between CAD systems stated rather than hidden.

Try: “Run a DFM analysis on this part for machining and tell me what fails”

Assemblies that check their own mates

Insert and position components, then ask for a mate by component name - the matching faces are found from the geometry. Every mate is checked against the assembly solver, and one that does not come back healthy is removed and reported rather than left in the tree looking finished.

Try: “Insert the pin at (0, 0, 18), make it concentric with the fork, and report the solver status and both bound faces' radii”

BOMs, interference, variants and clones

Export a bill of materials in four shapes - all levels, parts only, top level or indented - or build an assembly from a BOM spreadsheet. Check interference, make exploded views, switch between each CAD system's own variants, and clone a whole product structure with a rename rule.

Try: “Export a parts-only BOM with description, part number, material and revision columns to C:\reports\parts.xlsx”

Drawings with verified dimensions

Ask for a sheet with views and they are laid out so they neither overlap nor run off the sheet. When the expected value of a dimension is known, the created dimension is read back and one that does not match is removed. Notes, balloons, BOM tables, centre marks, GD&T, weld and surface-finish symbols are all available, and PDF, DXF and DWG export.

Try: “Create an A3 drawing of this part with front, top and right views and dimension every feature”

Showing and hiding

Hide and show components, bodies and reference planes without deleting or suppressing anything. Each change is read back entity by entity, so the reply counts what really changed, not what was attempted.

Try: “Hide every component except the pin”

Translate a feature tree between CAD systems

Extract a part's history to a plain JSON file in one CAD system and rebuild it feature by feature in another, so the target has real sketches and features you can edit - not the single dumb solid a STEP file gives you. The rebuild report lists every operation's outcome, and you compare volume and bounding box against the source.

Try: “Recreate the part from C:\transfer\bracket_tree.json and save it as C:\transfer\bracket_copy”

Features back on a dumb solid

Imported a STEP or Parasolid file with no history? Refeature Solid analyses the solid and rebuilds a feature tree - extrudes, revolves, fillets, chamfers, holes and patterns - and checks the result against the original's volume, bounding box and hole count. A rebuild that does not match is reported as a mismatch, not as a success.

Try: “Recognise the features on this solid and rebuild them”

Exchange formats

STEP, IGES, STL, Parasolid, SAT and JT for solids; PDF, DXF and DWG for drawings.

Try: “Export this part to STEP at C:\transfer\bracket.step”

A family of sizes from one master

Capture the values that drive a design - dimensions, parameters, properties, feature suppression, material - and fill in a grid of named instances. Generate writes each instance, reads every value back, saves it as its own file and puts the master back; an instance whose values do not hold is named and not saved.

Try: “Capture a variation template called "Bracket" from this part, including dimensions, parameters, properties and material”

Design studies and optimisation

Declare which dimensions may change, the limits and the goal, and the study runs: AI-driven, full factorial, Latin hypercube, gradient descent, NSGA-II for several objectives, the CAD system's own design of experiments, or topology optimisation. You apply the winner deliberately, then re-measure.

Solid Edge: single-variable goal seek only.

Try: “Make the rib thickness a design variable between 4 and 12 mm, keep von Mises stress under 180 MPa, and minimise mass”

Studies by chat

Say what the part is made of, what is held and what pushes on it. The study is created in the CAD system's own simulation environment, meshed and solved, and you get displacement, stress, factor of safety and reaction force. Faces are picked by geometry - the minX face, the largest face - and each pick is reported with its area and normal, so you can check the setup before you believe the result.

Solid Edge: Solid Edge Simulation - linear static, frequency, thermal and buckling.

Try: “Run a linear static stress analysis on this steel bracket: fix the minX face and apply 300 N in -Z on the maxX face. Report displacement and von Mises stress.”

Reports

Export the results as Word, HTML, Markdown, CSV or PDF, with the metric table and viewport images you captured.

Try: “Export the simulation results as a Word document to C:\reports\bracket.docx”

Your team's scripts, run from chat

Import macros, rules, journals and compiled .NET assemblies into the Automation Hub once, and anyone can run them by name with parameters. Importing never runs anything. Every run is judged by reading the document before and after, so a script that returned cleanly but changed nothing is reported as exactly that.

Solid Edge: macros (.bas) and .NET assemblies.

Try: “Import every script in C:\team\scripts into the Automation Hub”

Your CAD system's own recorder, and scheduled tasks

Start and stop the CAD system's own macro or journal recorder from chat, run existing scripts, and schedule work to run later on the workstation.

Try: “List my scheduled tasks”

Industry use cases

Fourteen rule-governed parts - aerospace, heavy machinery, marine, sheet metal, casting, machining, plastics, pressure equipment, automotive, medical, electronics, consumer products, energy and defence - built end to end with the governing rule cited and the measured volume from each CAD system they were run on.

Try: “I am a designer working in the aerospace industry. Design a machined 7075 aluminium fitting plate 120 x 60 x 12 with four M6 through holes at the minimum legal edge distance, save it and tell me the rule id and the measured volume.”

One assistant for every CAD you have open

A small balloon floats above your work and Ctrl+Alt+Space opens a place to type. The same conversation reaches every CAD system you have running: pick one in the Target box, or start an installed CAD from the same list. Work on one CAD never interleaves with work on another, and a destructive change asks for your permission first.

Try: “Which CAD sessions are connected?”

Dialogs handled, not stalled on

When a CAD command raises a dialog, a rule you saved answers it, a few well-known ones are handled for you, and anything else comes back to you with its title, message and buttons. It never types passwords, licence keys or credentials into a dialog.

Try: “Whenever the "update the assembly?" box appears, click Yes”

Install, repair and remove your CAD

The vendors' own documented command lines for installing, repairing and removing each CAD system silently ship with the agent. It shows you the exact command, the checks it passed and where the log will go, and nothing runs until you say yes - the Windows administrator prompt is yours to click. Afterwards it reads the installer's own log rather than trusting the exit code.

Support requests with your logs attached

Ask in the chat and a diagnostics zip - SphereHarness's logs, your CAD system's recent logs and crash dumps, what is installed and which add-ins are loaded - is built and attached to a new request. Attach any other file, ask where a request has got to, and hear through the notification bell when somebody answers.

Try: “Collect my logs and open a support request about the crash, attach them”

Markup board: point instead of describe

Draw on a live screenshot of your CAD window, an image, a page of a PDF drawing or grid paper, and send it as your next message. On a CAD screenshot, a circle becomes the actual face in the model, with its area and normal - no coordinate typed by hand.

Try: “What is the face I circled in red, and what is its area?”