How can AI empower a technical writer? – AI is rapidly changing our world, which we can easily see around us. We, as technical writers, are also not immune to AI impacts. It is good for us to adopt AI technology as soon as possible to keep ourselves in front of the race.
In the current world, AI-powered tools are empowering humans to complete tasks that were totally dependent on human effort more efficiently and accurately than a human can do. And it is a signal that if you are still underestimating AI, you will be outdated.
A technical writer requires technical writing skills to make comprehensive technical documentation. These AI-powered tools can streamline their tasks and processes to create high quality documentation without failure.
In this article, you will learn how a technical writer can take advantage of AI-powered tools to make their life easier. And at the same time, how can they increase their productivity without compromising the quality of their documentation?
Developing Technical content
Developing technical content is the most immediate advantage of AI that you can take in technical writing. AI can write technical content for your documentation. Additionally, it is also helpful to improve your content based on your audience.
There are many AI-powered tools, including ChatGPT, where you can take the help of AI to write efficient content by understanding and experimenting with prompts.
For example, in ChatGPT, if you give a prompt like “write 100 words for an article on ‘what is a cloud computer’ for a high school student”, next, if you give the prompt “write 100 words for an article on ‘what is a cloud computer’ for an IT professional”, you will get two different outputs.
This is how you can experiment with various prompts to get desired outputs that you can use in technical documentation. Remember, it is always recommended to give a human touch to AI-generated content. Because AI-generated content is often easily identified as lacking in the natural flow.
Grammatical and punctuation check
The grammar and punctuation errors make your language weak, hence, your reader can lose interest in reading the documentation. The use of correct grammar is important in technical writing, and it can be achieved by using AI-powered tools like Grammarly and QuillBot.
With the help of these tools, you can save your time for other important tasks. These tools are so smart to analyse the pattern of content and, based on that, provide suggestions to make content error-free.
Translation content
If your product is a global product, and you need to target audiences are more than one language. An AI-powered tool can support you here to translate your content in multiple languages to target your desired audience. And this is how AI improves accessibility in technical writing.
Examples of the best AI-powered translation tools are Google Translate, Amazon Translate, Reverso, and DeepL.
Automate routine tasks
Using AI, you can automate routine tasks, like updating code documents whenever there are changes in the source files. In real time example of this, an API technical writer can integrate an API document into a source code file. Next time, whenever any updates happen in the source file, AI will automatically extract the required inputs from the source code file, such as request and response parameters, and add them to the API documentation.
Handling routine inquiries
AI can help you handle daily inquiries raised by your users. You need to develop and train the natural language processing (NLP)-powered chatbot or virtual assistant on the natural language inputs. It will start understanding your user queries and extracting the relevant answers from the available technical documents. These answers will be served to the users as a form of reply from an AI-powered chatbot or virtual assistance.
Establishing a style guide
AI can help you make concise documents throughout your organisation. Being a technical writer, everyone must follow a style guide. It can be a generic style guide like MSTP, Chicago style guide for technical writers, or an organisation-specific style guide. You can use an AI-powered tool to develop concise documentation based on your style guide.
It can help the technical editor establish a specific style guide for all documentation created by the technical writers’ team. In fact, it can replace your technical editor role in the technical writers’ team.
Automate version control
You can take advantage of AI to automate the version control system for technical documentation. AI-powered tools can save the new version of the document and keep track of the changes that have been made to the documentation by the contributor. This will enable the technical writer to check previous versions of documentation for quick comparison whenever needed.
Improve content strategy
You can take the help of AI-powered tool to improve your content strategy. What you need to do is just give access to AI to understand the pattern of how your readers consume the content and what feedback they are giving. Based on the inputs, the AI-powered tool will give some suggestions and future predictions that will help you improve your current content strategy. This is how you can improve your user engagement for the technical documentation.