How Generative AI can help Technical Writers save time – Extracting specifications

Here is a Use Case of where generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, can help Technical Writers save time in producing user documentation.

This is a scenario where you have to extract technical specifications from a collection of PDF documents.

For more information, see Cherryleaf’s “Using Generative AI in technical writing” e-elearning course.

Transcript

If you’re involved in technical writing, you have to create user guides and similar types of documents.

One situation you may well have faced is that you’re given a lot of information, but it’s in different sources. It’s in one PDF and another PDF, and you have to spend a lot of time copying and pasting to get that information into your draft, into your document.

In this video I’d like to show you a way how generative AI can make that process easier, make it easier to get that information from those different sources and put together into one single place. Imagine we work for a company that distributes Pilatus fitness machines. We’ve been given different PDFs and within them there is the information we need, which is the dimensions of the different machines. And we want to put that onto the website. And normally we would have to copy and paste between those different documents. So instead we can use a prompt and select the different PDFs that we want to extract that information from. Ask the generative AI system to do that. And we can ask it to output the content as a markdown file format.

And here it is. And we can copy that text and paste it into a markdown editor. And we can say yes, it’s in the markdown format. And this is something that we cover in our e-learning course on using generative AI in technical writing.