Five ways to use AI in technical writing (beyond the obvious)

As a research tool

You can retrieve code changes from a repository and use AI to look at the changes and summarise them as release notes or change note or make recommendations on what needs to be amended within the user documentation.

Reviewing content

You can get AI to simulate different types of users and give you feedback on the content: what they think of the documentation from that persona’s perspective.

Creating scripts to automate tasks

You can get AI to write scripts to automate mundane tasks. For example, updating diagrams or images whenever the code changes and requires a change to them.

Creating management dashboards

You can create dashboards that can bring in live data to explain how the department is performing. That might be graphs for support ticket reduction for a week or a month, the most popular pages, page accuracy, and the pages with errors.

You can also create dashboards showing the return on investment for having a technical publications department.

To help you generate deterministic tests for your documentation

This might be checking your documentation against your style guide, or testing what’s written in the documentation. If someone follows the instructions, when in the application itself, do that results in the end result that you desired.

{
"tests": [
{
"runOn": [
{
"platforms": [
"windows",
"mac",
"linux"
],
"browsers": {
"name": "chrome",
"headless": false,
"viewport": {
"width": 1180,
"height": 1480
}
}
}
],
"steps": [
{
"description": "Go to the specified URL",
"goTo": "http://localhost:8080/watson_and_holmes_intake_form.html"
},
{
"description": "Type in the First Name",
"find": {
"elementText": "First Name:",
"click": true,
"type": "Alphie"
}
},
{
"description": "Type in the Last Name",
"find": {
"elementText": "Last Name:",
"click": true,
"type": "Betaux"
}
},
{
"description": "Capture a screenshot of the completed form.",
"screenshot": "./output/form-filled-1-first-and-last-name.png"
},
{
"description": "Pause long enough to show the changes.",
"wait": 10000
}
]
}
]
}

If you’re interested in learning more

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can implement these tools, feel free to get in touch with us at Cherryleaf.