It's not really "auto-draw" as much as it's a visual search in which you suggest shapes and it looks across the collection for visually similar icons. Impressive and fun, but not yet a huge advancement over just typing "house" or "cake" to search the image library.
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Their description made it sound like a really cool lower-level tool, so obviously it ends up being a letdown.
Drawing/art programs generally have a line smoothing feature - just smoothing your wobbly lines as you draw, using relatively simple algorithms. The description here made me hope for something more "medium-level", half-way between the two. It wouldn't just smooth your lines - it would adjust them according to context, based on a corpus of more precise line drawings, and perhaps predict/suggest the next strokes. It might be difficult to pull off though, if implemented naively it would probably just work against the artist.
This kind of functionality sort of exists in a basic form in the default mail on iOS using a feature called Markup. Markup tries to guess if you drew an arrow or a circle and suggests it based on your drawing.
On a similar note, this site can recognize handwritten mathematical equations (not just one symbol at a time):
as well as microsoft's baked right into office Ink to Math convert
Xournal also does this for simple geometry.
In some cases, yes its easier to search, but it does fill a use case. I'm not an illustrator yet often need icons. I tend to have a rough idea of what I want but can struggle to find the right keywords. Visual search here is very useful, and allows an element of play for finding the icon. (Hopefully play, not horrible frustration)
Yeah. What would make it really stand out is if it were compositional. Judging based on the demo animation, it doesn't appear to be so.
I'm not sure what you mean by "compositional", but you can keep drawing after you've matched a shape and it will start suggesting matches for your new shape as well--though unfortunately it doesn't seem to auto-scale the icon you pick to the size of your original drawing, so unless they're already the size you want it's not as helpful as one might hope.
I guess GP means, I start drawing a cat, and it becomes a nicely drawn cat, then I add wings and a horn and a pistol and it becomes a flying laser unicorn cat.
I assumed this was the big idea in TFA, but it seems it's a collection of clip arts, with a terrible interface for looking them up.
I am super confused by the existence of this.
I guess GP means, I start drawing a cat, and it becomes a nicely drawn cat, then I add wings and a horn and a pistol and it becomes a flying laser unicorn cat.
Yes, exactly. And then you start sketching a few rough buildings, a beam, some comets, some explosions, and a helicopter: it becomes a drawing of a giant flying unicorn laser cat from space, attacking Tokyo.
Edit: something like this [0].
[0] https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/78/9c/99/789c99430...
Your use of the word compositional is still a little confusing to me. Cool cat though...
OP's example is maybe a little odd, but I admit that the very first thing I tried was "compositional" as well. I drew a mountain, clicked the icon to make it into a mountain, and then drew a bike going up it. However, there was no way to have a drawing with both a mountain and a bike.
It is easy enough to scale them though. And you can flip them horizontally or vertically too.
I could have sworn none of those controls were there an hour ago. At any rate, now that I can scale things here's a random icon I drew to demonstrate the point: https://www.autodraw.com/share/G2IIQMITW0BB
Indeed ... Google docs has had this feature for some time. If you want to insert a special character or symbol, it gives the option to draw it and then shows similar characters.
Quickdraw (same technology) definitely seemed to do more than simple shape searching.
If you mean that the algorithm was non-trivial, that's probably true. But I don't see what else you could do with it besides recognising a hand-drawn shape.