AI and chatbots in technical communication – A primer

It seems likely artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-driven chatbots will play a key role in helping users in the future. So what does this mean for technical communicators and for User Assistance? This podcast is based on an article we’ll be posting to tekom’s Intelligent Information blog. The article is currently out for review, and… Read more »

The return of Clippy?

Are we seeing the the spiritual child of Clippy emerge? Truth Labs’s Stelios Constantinides has written an article on his experiments with conversational UIs. Conversational user interfaces (CUIs) are a spoken or written way of interacting with a device. CUIs aren’t completely new, but they’re becoming smarter, more natural, and — therefore — more useful. Here’s where CUIs come in:… Read more »

Using Markdown to create a boilerplate document for reports and proposals

Following on from our post Cutting and pasting content into Word documents – Is there a better way?, we’ve been looking at how organisations could use Markdown to create reports and proposals more quickly and consistently. The objective was to: Create something simple for non-technical people to use. Have a collection of re-usable chunks of content that… Read more »

How on earth could the Apple Watch be used in technical communication?

Whenever Apple launches a new product range, there’s a great deal of buzz and excitement. There’s lots of speculation as to how the technology could be applied by different professions and by consumers. Yesterday’s launch of the Apple Watch was no exception. The title of this post may give away the fact that this post… Read more »