By Ruchi Vohra

This article is a series of two parts that talks about designing content for Artificial Intelligence. In this part, I’m starting off with understanding and designing Intelligent Content.

Source: http://www.papertracer.com/blog/document-management-software-with-document-intelligence

Everybody is talking about Artificial Intelligence, intelligent assistants, chatbots, and the like. Even if you don’t have one yet, how do you get your content ready for the future full of AI assistants?  What does this mean for you as a content developer?

AI industry is evolving rapidly making the voice-based and text-based user assistance as your new interface. It is like any hired help, each of them with different skills and quirks based on your need.

What is an Intelligent Content?

Intelligent Content is not the content itself, it is an amalgamation of the human brain with the technology. That is, it is the way the content is structured, allowing it to be used efficiently and intelligently. Intelligent content is intended to be segmental, structured, reusable, format-free, and semantically rich. So that it can be used in any desired format.

We all have content everywhere within our organization in various forms such as customer documentation, FAQs, knowledge base, online help, and the like. So, where to and how to begin?

Audit Existing Content

Before starting, you should always know where you stand, how much content is available with you, if you can use this content, or if you need to modify it. To understand this, audit your existing content. Auditing helps you in generating a report on the existing, the existed and the missing content. Use the report for creating a content model.

Create Content Model

A content model is not a menu or a decision tree. A content model is context-independent and therefore, it enables you to map the content types, output platforms, and metadata elements for each content type. From here, you can create consistent, predictable and logical guidelines for content creation, and at the same time provide structure to your source content that allows you to create scalable and future-proof content.

Create Content Library

When creating your library, use the following structure to maximize your content:

1. Taxonomy: Capture and create content using the taxonomy. The first function of a taxonomy is to help people understand the structure of a knowledge domain at a glance. Predictability is the most important feature of good taxonomy design. It is necessary to understand the natural categorization patterns of your different user communities and to balance out the ways that they compete or conflict with each other.
2. Metadata: Metadata drives search facet, search terms, and tag all or some parts of your content, making it semantically aware and searchable. The product and its features are tagged with metadata, enabling it to be indexed and sorted.
3. Reuse: Create a source once and reuse several times because of the rich structure. This allows several components to be used multiple times for outputs of different formats.
4. Granular Content: Each independent piece of content that you create becomes discoverable, reusable, and adaptable to your output requirements.

Deliver Context-driven Content

There is a paradigm shift in the way end-user access information. We have a multi-channel delivery method such as customer portals, smartphones, chatbots, and AR apps to access and consume any information anywhere.

To create the content that is adaptable and caters to the new age user requirement, we need to move from concept-based and task-based writing to context-based writing. Use the following elements to create stand-alone, format independent pieces of content that are intelligent and efficient:

• Capturing Context
• Classifying Intents
• Defining Entities
• Matching Context and Content

In part 2 of this series, I ‘will be diving deep into content modeling and context-based writing with examples for AI. Stay tuned!

About the Author

Ruchi Vohra has over 10 years of experience as a Technical Writer. She is a documentation manager with Innovatia, based in Bangalore, India. She has an extensive experience in technical communication, content strategy, delivery, recruitment, and training. She is passionate about research in the fields of Agile Methodology, User Experience through UI and User-centric design, and Information Experience.