tekom spring conference in Freiburg/Breisgau. A review

The tekom spring conference in Freiburg/Breisgau this year presented a variety of fascinating and diverse topics that inspired the participants.

Focus on artificial intelligence

One focus was, of course, artificial intelligence (AI). Among other things, we discussed how a prompt guide can help technical communicators standardize recurring tasks and achieve more consistent results.

What is a prompt guide?

A prompt guide provides structured instructions, guidelines, and examples to help authors work with AI language models. The guide can cover various aspects, such as formatting the generated text, using specific terminology, and adhering to corporate guidelines or industry standards. This can bring some structure to generated text that is difficult to structure.

Featured presentation (in German)

• Daniel Baldassare, doctima: Technische Redaktion und KI: Was leistet ein Prompt-Leitfaden?

More topics: new Machinery Regulation, accessibility, and content publishing

In addition to AI, other important topics were discussed: the new Machinery Directive, legal aspects of accessibility and their relevance to technical communication, and innovative approaches to content publishing.

Featured presentations (in German)

• Carina Streicher: “Mach den Weg frei?! – Barrierefreiheit in der Technischen Redaktion
• Fluid Topics: Die Zukunft des Content-Publishing

My presentation about AI processes in technical documentation

In Patrick McCrae's (LangTec) and my presentation "Hammer oder Schweizer Taschenmesser? Welches KI-Verfahren wird wo am sinnvollsten eingesetzt? (Hammer or Swiss army knife? Which AI process makes the most sense where?) we wanted to take a broader look at the use of AI in technical documentation. We were interested not only in the different AI processes that can solve different tasks, but also in the potential of these processes in the content lifecycle.

We were encouraged by the positive feedback from the audience, who confirmed the potential of AI in the areas discussed and even suggested ideas for implementing the use cases. We should not be afraid to find new applications for AI in our daily work, but we should also analyze our processes in a structured way and start with describing the problem – instead of finding more and more use cases for ChatGPT.