Types of AI-Powered Assistance Tech Writers Say They Want

During a recent webinar — Prompt Fundamentals with ChatGPT: Enhancing Technical Documentation with Josh Cavalier — we ran a poll asking our audience which types of AI-powered assistance they think might be most beneficial to technical writers.

Overall, the results indicate a clear preference for AI assistance in making content clear, concise, and consistent, with nearly 40% of writers voting for this capability.

Other assistance tech writers hope to gain from generative AI include ensuring adherence to style rules (20%) and improving the structure of DITA content (18%).

Topic insertion (11%) and content summarization (11%) are seen by writers who participated in the poll as less beneficial compared to the other options.

Breaking the numbers down

Ensure our content is clear, concise, and consistent: 38%

This option attracted the highest percentage of respondents, strongly indicating they consider clarity, brevity, and consistency the most significant AI contribution.

Make sure our content follows our style rules: 20%

One-in-five poll participants value AI's ability to maintain content adherence to predefined style rules. Maintaining a consistent style proves crucial for readability and brand consistency in technical documentation.

Generative AI can help technical writers ensure their content adheres to both internal style rules and external style guides, enhancing consistency, accuracy, and efficiency in documentation.

Help structure and improve our DITA content: 18%

Nearly one-in-five respondents seek AI assistance to structure and improve content created in accordance with the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) framework, renowned for its documentation reusability and scalability.

Tech docs shops that use DITA might find generative AI particularly beneficial for structuring and improving their content for several reasons:

• Reduce the impact of complexity DITA is an XML-based architecture that is highly structured and modular. It allows for the reuse of content across different documents and platforms. Generative AI can help manage the complexity by automating the organization and categorization of content into the appropriate DITA elements (like topics, tasks, concepts, and references).
• Consistency One of the core benefits of using DITA is content consistency. Generative AI can analyze large volumes of documentation to ensure that the same terms, phrases, and language structures are used throughout, which is crucial for clear and consistent communication.
• ScalabilityAs documentation collections grow, they become increasingly challenging to maintain. AI can assist in scaling up content production without sacrificing quality, by quickly generating drafts and suggesting improvements that align with DITA's hierarchical structure.
• Error Reduction With help from AI, teams can dramatically reduce human errors that are common in manual content structuring and editing, such as incorrect tagging or misclassification, which can affect the reuse and delivery of content. Error reduction in technical documentation is vital because it builds user trust and credibility, ensures usability, and upholds safety and compliance standards, which are particularly critical in regulated industries. Accurate docs prevent costly post-publication corrections, enhances customer self-service efficiency, and improves the overall customer experience. Furthermore, reducing errors helps protect your brand image and reflects positively on perceived quality.
• EfficiencyAutomating the process of structuring content with AI can free up writers to focus on more strategic tasks, such as content planning and strategy improvements, rather than the time-consuming minutiae of tagging and formatting.
• Content ReuseDITA's reuse capabilities are one of its strongest features. AI can help identify opportunities for reuse that a human might overlook, ensuring that content is efficiently recycled and consistently applied across all relevant areas.

Insert topic types (tables, lists, charts): 11%

Fewer respondents consider the insertion of specific topic types like tables, lists, and charts as the most beneficial AI-powered assistance. This suggests that while important, there might be other tasks where AI could provide more significant improvements on some technical documentation teams. Automatically generating and formatting tables and charts using AI can streamline the effort required to transform raw data into visually appealing and structured assets that align with required documentation standards. By meticulously organizing data and visually representing it, AI-powered assistants enable writers to concentrate on content development rather than spending time on the manual tasks of formatting and error checking.

Summarize content contained in a document: 11%

The same as for topic types, this percentage reflects a smaller group of users who find summarization of content as the most beneficial AI-powered assistance. Summarization can be useful for creating abstracts or executive summaries, but it seems less of a priority compared to ensuring content clarity and adherence to style rules.That said, allowing GenAI to summarize content locked inside a documents (or a set of documents) offers significant benefits to those organizations using DITA for several reasons.

First, it can streamline the creation of abstracts and executive summaries, which are crucial for providing quick insights into complex technical documents. This efficiency is especially valuable in DITA's modular framework, where summaries can aid in understanding the context and relevance of individual topics or sections.

Second, GenAI-driven summaries can facilitate content reuse — a cornerstone of DITA — by highlighting reusable information blocks, thereby enhancing consistency across different documents and reducing duplication of effort. This process can also aid in identifying gaps or redundancies in the content, enabling tech writers to optimize the documentation suite more effectively.