Ask Us Anything: AVAIL Roadmap, AI Chatbots, New Ways to Group Revit Content, and More

AVAIL CEO and Founder Randall Stevens and Sales Director Will Rouse hosted an open Ask Us Anything meeting March 26, 2024. The meeting—intended for anyone in the AEC industry—was recorded and is available to watch below. We’ve also pulled together some quick highlights, including AVAIL’s development roadmap, timestamped demos of up-and-coming features, and some Q&As of note for easy skimming. 

Watch the Meeting

Meeting Highlights

Randall’s favorite rock band 

Let’s get this out of the way: Randall’s favorite rock band is Rush. 

AVAIL Development Roadmap

Randall shared the 2024 Roadmap [6:08]

•  Revit application versioning is coming very soon.
  
• Autodesk’s 2025 release cycle is coming, and our plugins will be ready to roll soon, too.
  
• Project Navigator updates in the 2025 release cycle.
  
• A new feature, Palettes (see demo below), is nearing development completion.
  

AVAIL's 2024 product development roadmap

 
DEmos 

Randall demonstrated the following AVAIL features:

Palettes [9:20]

• Soon-to-be-released Palettes are small groupings of content that the user can create to drive workflows, collect favorites, share Revit content for specific projects, and more! 

PDF Export [14:10]

• This upcoming feature will give users the ability to quickly move AVAIL content into a pdf document to redline or share external to AVAIL. 

Related Content [15:48]

• Also an upcoming feature, Related Content gives publishers the ability to connect related pieces of information within AVAIL making it easier for users to leverage related information.

FOVEA [22:04] & [36:04]

• From our sister company, ArchVision, FOVEA is a 3D model configuration tool that translates geometry, materials and textures natively between Revit, Sketchup, Rhino, Enscape, Blender and nine other popular file formats. 

AVAIL AI Chatbot [38:45]

• Our experimental Chatbot can answer questions from AVAIL’s Helpdesk knowledge base. 

Customized AI Chatbot for Channels [40:08]

• Also a compelling experiment in the works at AVAIL, our customized AI Chatbots can be fed a collection of documents in an AVAIL Channel, helping your team “have conversations with” your own data sources. 

Q&As of note

When will Revit Assemblies be available to harvest and upload to AVAIL? 

• We will share this with select customers in a week or two for testing. Connect with our team if you are interested in the preview version. 

Do you have recommendations for getting smaller organizations into a CMS?

• We’ve helped five people use the product, and we’ve helped 5,000 people use the product. There is some amount of content management work involved, but it will certainly reduce the amount of time your team is searching for files. 

Autodesk has announced that they will go “file-less” and that the Autodesk Industry Cloud called Forma will work via API. Will AVAIL also work with this vision?

• AVAIL is well-suited for this, actually. It may not be a file, but it's a piece of data somewhere that's going to need a content management interface on the front-end to get to it. As long as the APIs are accessible, we can virtualize it. 

When are you planning a users’ meeting?

• The plan is to offer a couple of online options throughout this year and then something in person the day before AU. 

In reference to FOVEA and ArchVision, how does that pairing look for AVAIL in the future? What kind of influences on our workflows will that have? 

• We plan to leverage the FOVEA technology to provide improved thumbnails and a 3D viewer for Revit Families.

Continue the Conversation 

AVAIL hosts a series of AEC industry professional development events called Confluence. On April 17, 2024, we will explore The Realities of AI + ML in New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Consider joining us to continue the conversation. Explore the Confluence NYC event details.

About THE HOST

Founded in 2016 as a solution for architectural firms, AVAIL creates software for the global architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. AVAIL’s content management system (CMS) platform and Revit application tools help designers and engineers take control of their intricate network of files in one visual, streamlined solution. Spun out of ArchVision, a provider of Rich Photorealistic Content (RPC), AVAIL’s customers include industry leaders like Gensler, Perkins + Will, IMEG, LEO A DALY, and Populous. AVAIL also hosts a series of AEC industry professional development events called Confluence that bring design technology and product management leaders together in collaborative discourse.