When people talk about AI form builders, they usually focus on prompt generation.
That is important, but it is not the whole workflow. Real surveys start in different places. Sometimes you have a goal but no questions. Sometimes you have a detailed, already-approved research plan. Sometimes you have an old PDF that someone has been emailing around for years. Sometimes the questions are sitting in a Notion doc or a spreadsheet.
So Formaly supports three core creation paths (plus a fourth shortcut for content that already exists as text) because real work is messy.
1. Build from a prompt
Prompt generation is the fastest way to start. You describe what you want to learn, who the audience is, and what tone you want. Formaly turns that into a structured survey with appropriate question types, sensible ordering, and intro/outro copy.
Good prompts include context:
Create a churn survey for SaaS users who canceled during the trial.
I want to understand activation friction, pricing objections, missing
features, and whether we should follow up for interviews.
Best when you know the research goal but do not want to stare at a blank page. Because generation respects survey-design principles, the first draft tends to avoid double-barreled questions and unbalanced scales, so you start from something defensible, not just something fast.
2. Build manually
The manual builder is for precision. Sometimes you already know the questions, your team has approved the wording, or the survey must match a research plan exactly. In those cases, AI should stay out of the way: add questions, choose types, reorder blocks, edit labels, and control structure directly.
The manual builder exists because serious survey work often needs human judgment, and a slash-command editor keeps that fast, so you add a rating, matrix, or ranking block by typing / instead of hunting through menus.
3. Import from PDF
Many organizations already have forms trapped inside PDFs:
- Intake forms
- Application forms
- Research questionnaires
- Event registration forms
- Compliance checklists
- Customer onboarding documents
PDF import is built for this reality. Upload the document, let Formaly extract the questions, then edit the result. It is not meant to be magic, it is meant to remove the repetitive copying.
Bonus: paste to create
Not every source is a PDF. Sometimes the questions live in an email, a Google Doc, a spreadsheet, a Notion page, or an old survey export. Paste-to-create lets you drop that messy content in and turn it into structured questions, so you do not rebuild a survey that already exists somewhere in plain text.
Why multiple paths matter
AI-only products can be impressive in demos and frustrating in real workflows. Manual-only builders are reliable but slow. Import-only tools solve one narrow problem. The better approach is to let the starting point match the user:
- Start from a prompt when you have intent.
- Start from the builder when you have structure.
- Start from a PDF when you have legacy material.
- Start from paste when the questions already exist as text.
What I am optimizing for
The future of form creation is not one interface. It is a flexible workflow that meets the work where it already lives.
Formaly's job is to shorten the distance between intent and a useful survey, whether that intent begins as a sentence, a blank builder, a file, or a pasted block of text.