Timeline Maker AI FAQs

Timeline Maker AI is an experimental tool by Preceden that lets you generate timelines on any topic using artificial intelligence.

How do I access it?

Timeline Maker AI is available on Preceden's homepage.

How much does it cost?

Timeline Maker AI is free to use and does not require you to sign up for a Preceden account.

Editing a timeline you create with Timeline Maker AI does require a Preceden account, but a free one is enough to get started. You can create one in two ways:

Click the Edit Timeline button above the generated timeline.
Click the Sign Up button at the top of the page and explore Preceden from there.

A free account lets you open the timeline in the editor, change its appearance, delete events, and adjust the dates, notes, colors, and icons of the events Timeline Maker AI added. Generated timelines usually have more events than the free plan's limit of 10. While a timeline is over that limit, adding your own events and renaming the generated ones require a paid plan.

How does it work?

Behind the scenes, Timeline Maker AI uses a large language model, the same kind of technology behind tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, with prompts tailored for creating timelines.

What type of timelines does it work well for?

Timeline Maker AI works best for well-known historical events you could look up on a search engine, such as World War II or the history of space exploration. It also works well for fictional timelines, like a timeline of future human space exploration.

If your timeline covers content that is only known to you or is not available online (a project plan specific to your organization, say, or a personal legal case), Timeline Maker AI cannot generate an accurate timeline. It is still worth a try as a starting point, but expect to edit heavily to fit your own material.

How accurate is it for historical timelines?

For well-known historical events, the timelines generated with Timeline Maker AI are usually very accurate.

However, the less well-known the topic, the more likely it is that the timeline will contain inaccuracies. For that reason, we recommend double-checking the content when the topic is not well known. Learn more in our Hallucinated Events guide.

It is also less reliable for very recent events, so it won't work well for timelines about the last few years.

Lastly, because of a limitation in web browsers, Preceden only supports events after about 200,000 BC, so this tool cannot generate timelines about topics older than that.

Above the AI-generated timeline, you'll see an Export & Share button. Without an account, you can use Copy Link to copy the timeline's address, Open in new tab to view it on a page of its own, and the Tweet and Facebook items to post it.

The PDF and Image items work a little differently: clicking either one asks you to create a Preceden account before the export runs.

What else should I know?

Start dates

By default, timelines about the future start next Monday. You can request a specific start date instead. For example:

Trip to Venice in August
Plan to get in shape starting in May
Zombie apocalypse next month

Durations

Similarly, you can request a specific duration for project plans:

Two week trip to Venice in August
Six month startup launch plan

Languages

Preceden detects the language of the topic you search for and generates the timeline in that language.

For example:

A search for Inteligencia Artificial would result in a timeline about AI in Spanish
A search for Artificial Intelligence would result in a timeline about AI in English
A search for Artificial Intelligence in Spanish would result in a timeline about AI in Spanish

Gantt charts

To get a Gantt chart instead, include the word "Gantt" anywhere in the topic:

Product launch plan Gantt chart

How do I contact support?

You can contact us anytime at [email protected].

We welcome questions and feedback, especially any bugs or inaccurate data you might encounter.