This week, I decided to experiment with using AI for a task that regularly eats up my time in patent drafting: creating professional flowcharts for computer-implemented inventions. There are, of course, commercial tools emerging for the automated generation of patent drawings, mostly as part of more comprehensive AI drafting assistance systems. My specific goal, however, was to see if I could develop a reliable system, using a general-purpose AI chatbot for which I already have a paid subscription (my chatbot-of-choice is Anthropic’s Claude), to go from a plain English algorithm description to a publication-ready, annotated flowchart suitable for a patent specification. And it turns out (spoiler alert) that the answer is yes.
What you will see below is a demonstration of the conversion of an algorithm – Euclid's method for finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) – described in everyday language into a professionally annotated flowchart in under five minutes.
I generally use PowerPoint for this kind of work – it is included with my Office 365 subscription, and thus incurs zero marginal cost. Some people use professional drawing applications, such as Visio, which provide more tools that can be used to speed up the process. And there are also specialised flowcharting applications available, although these can still be tedious to use for complex algorithms and – more importantly – they don't address the need for professional annotation with reference numerals and leader lines that patent specifications require.
