FiftyThree’s Paper app now helps you sketch graphs by hand with new auto-correction and diagram tools

FiftyThree, the New York-based company behind a popular drawing app and accompanying smart stylus, has revealed its next steps to infiltrate the potentially lucrative enterprise realm: a new set of digital drawing tools designed to expedite the creation of charts, diagrams, and sketches for presentations. And it’s powered by a new Intention Engine that second-guesses what shapes freehand sketchers are trying to create.

First announced back in March, Think Kit is bringing “mobile whiteboarding at the speed of thought,” according to FiftyThree. It basically lets users draw shapes, connectors, and visual models that can be exported for use elsewhere — including PowerPoint presentations.

With 14 million downloads to date, FiftyThree has made a big name for itself in the digital creativity sphere with its popular Paper app, which Apple named iPad app of the year in 2012. Feeding into Paper is its smart stylus, called Pencil, that lets you commit your ideas to a virtual sketchpad with a physical implement.

Though Paper was always free to download with basic drawing tools, until recently users had to pay $0.99 each for additional tools. In February, however, the company made all these tools available for free, with FiftyThree putting all bets on its $60 Pencil stylus instead. This was shortly after Apple started selling the stylus in its retail stores around the world.

This move also signaled a refocus for the company, with Georg Petschnigg, CEO and cofounder of FiftyThree, telling VentureBeat at the time:

We’re excited about the amount of teachers and students who already use Paper and Pencil to give lectures or take notes. Making the tools free will also allow us to offer easier access to classrooms across the world.

But it wasn’t just about targeting schools. Fresh from a $30 million funding  round, FiftyThree revealed plans for the enterprise too. “Our most common tools for innovative thinking — sticky notes, legal pads, and whiteboards — are stuck in the past,” said Petschnigg. “With this investment, we’ve accepted the challenge of bringing a new crop of tools for creative thinking to places where they matter most: education and enterprise. It’s about making creativity accessible to all.”

So Paper users can now access the tools Diagram, Fill, and Cut as part of the new Think Kit, which can be used by anyone from marketers to analysts.

Above: Think Kit

Image Credit: FiftyThree

Given the myriad of applications businesses use for reports and presentations, FiftyThree has made it easy to export the creations to PowerPoint, Keynote, Trello, Evernote, and Dropbox, among others.

Back in March, FiftyThree teased a new feature of Paper called the Intention Engine, which it called a “breakthrough for pen and touch input that dramatically speeds up the creation of diagrams, charts, and presentation sketches.” This too is now a part of the app’s core offering, though it’s restricted to the Think Kit tools for now. However, it is a particularly interesting feature.

The Intention Engine is a “drawing-recognition and rendering system,” kind of like SwiftKey but for sketching shapes. It predicts your true intentions when drawing, in real time, to speed up the process. So if you’re using the stylus to draw a circle, for example, Paper detects what shape you’re trying to create and automatically turns it into a well-formed circle. It’s an autocorrect for bad drawers, for want of a better analogy.

The new Paper for iPad is available to download now.