Dictate turns authors’ hand-drawn sketches into book graphics

Dictate, Appendment LLC’s AI book-writing service, has added a tool that turns nonfiction authors’ hand-drawn sketches and diagrams into polished graphics for their manuscripts. The feature, announced Oct. 22, is available through the service’s online author portal and is aimed at experts who want to use their own visual frameworks without hiring an illustrator. Authors can select “Turn my drawing into a graphic” from a chapter, use the portal’s material-submission form, or send a photograph of a drawing by text message or email. According to the company’s announcement, they can choose either a clean, labeled-diagram treatment or an illustration style. The system is designed to retain the drawing’s components, arrows, labels and layout. It corrects obvious misspellings of ordinary words, while retaining names and numbers as supplied by the author. Each redrawn image then undergoes an automated comparison of its labels with those on the original sketch. A mismatch triggers one further redraw; if a difference remains, the image is delivered with a request that the author check the labels. The author sees a preview and must approve the graphic before it is inserted into the chapter, while the original drawing remains on file as its source. In an internal test of 10 sketches, the company said nine were redrawn cleanly on the first attempt. The remaining sketch was flagged because crossed-out words could not be read, a result that underscores the tool’s dependence on a legible original. Founder Michael Giannulis said the software handles the design work while the underlying idea remains the author’s, and that authors approve every graphic before it enters a book. As we reported on Oct. 19, Dictate creates nonfiction books from guided phone conversations and returns chapters to authors for review through its portal. The company says its process can use up to 15 hours of AI-led interviews, depending on the package, and aims to produce a completed book in four to eight weeks, subject to the author’s interview and review pace. It also says authors retain full copyright in their books and that Dictate takes no royalties. That claim sits alongside U.S. Copyright Office guidance that copyright protects human creativity, while the treatment of works containing AI-generated material is assessed case by case. The office says registration applicants must disclose AI-generated content and describe the human author’s contributions; protection may cover a sufficiently creative human selection or arrangement, but only the human-authored elements.