When Drawing Is Not Enough: Exploring Spontaneous Speech with Sketch for Intent Alignment in Multimodal LLMs

Abstract

Early-stage design ideation often relies on rough sketches created under time pressure, leaving much of the designer's intent implicit. In practice, designers frequently speak while sketching, verbally articulating functional goals and ideas that are difficult to express visually. We introduce TalkSketchD, a sketch-while-speaking dataset that captures spontaneous speech temporally aligned with freehand sketches during early-stage toaster ideation. To examine the dataset's value, we conduct a sketch-to-image generation study comparing sketch-only inputs with sketches augmented by concurrent speech transcripts using multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Generated images are evaluated against designers' self-reported intent using a reasoning MLLM as a judge. Quantitative results show that incorporating spontaneous speech significantly improves judged intent alignment of generated design images across form, function, experience, and overall intent. These findings demonstrate that temporally aligned sketch-and-speech data can enhance MLLMs' ability to interpret user intent in early-stage design ideation.