Preparing Your Content for Bots? I Am Not.

Pre­dic­tions that tech­ni­cal writ­ers will be writ­ing for bots any time soon are overblown. From one upcom­ing tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­fer­ence, here is a sam­pling of some of the upcom­ing presentations:

• “Con­nect­ing a Chat­bot to Your Tech­ni­cal Content.”
• “Your Chat­bot Can Lit­er­al­ly Talk Back.”
• “Prepar­ing for Change in a World of Non-Stop Change: Beyond Chat­bots and Voice.”

Ear­li­er this year, I watched two webi­na­rs on how tech­ni­cal writ­ers can write con­tent for bots. One of the pre­sen­ters acknowl­edged that he felt that writ­ing for bots is in its “infan­cy.” To me, the take­away is this trend isn’t going to take off any­time soon, at least in the tech­ni­cal writ­ing community.

Tech­nolo­gies like bots are tout­ed by indi­vid­u­als who orga­nize tech­ni­cal writ­ing con­fer­ences and con­sul­tants who are more than hap­py to ped­dle clients the “next big thing.” There’s also a lot of fear about arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and how the robots will usurp all of our jobs. From my per­spec­tive, in my home­town of Van­cou­ver, BC, I find that the adop­tion of new tech­nolo­gies with­in the tech­ni­cal writ­ing com­mu­ni­ty is often slow.

Here is an exam­ple I can share to illus­trate the point. For years, we heard about using the ben­e­fits of struc­tured author­ing using data mod­els for author­ing and pub­lish­ing like Dar­win Infor­ma­tion Typ­ing Archi­tec­ture (DITA). Ten years ago, I was writ­ing in XML using DITA. It seemed like it was going to be the next thing. I was a believ­er. But my unwa­ver­ing faith in all things DITA waned when I real­ized it was a mar­gin­al play­er in a city with a flour­ish­ing high-tech com­mu­ni­ty that employs more than 100,000 peo­ple. More often than not, tech­ni­cal writ­ing depart­ments are writ­ing unstruc­tured con­tent using tools like FrameMak­er, Mad­Cap Flare, wikis, and Microsoft Word.

I am sure that com­pa­nies like Adobe and Mad­Cap will soon intro­duce sup­port for bots. But even when sup­port is intro­duced, I am not expect­ing the change will rev­o­lu­tion­ize life for tech­ni­cal writ­ers in the short term.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not ignor­ing bots. But I don’t feel like I need to jump on the band­wag­on either. There is fre­quent­ly a chasm between what is being pro­mot­ed at con­fer­ences and in webi­na­rs and the real­i­ty of over­worked tech­ni­cal writ­ing depart­ments who may not have time to quick­ly adopt new technologies.