Guide
AI assistant for technical documentation: the guide
Product sheets, operating procedures, catalogues, manuals: an AI assistant can make this documentation usable across the whole company. Provided you know what it really does, and what to demand from it.
What is an AI assistant for technical documentation?
It is a tool that answers, in plain language, questions asked about your own technical documents. Instead of searching dozens of PDFs for a keyword, a technician or salesperson asks their question (“What tightening torque for the VF-7.5 terminals?”) and gets the answer, with the document and page it comes from.
The difference with a general-purpose assistant is essential: a documentation assistant only answers from your documents. It does not fill gaps with general knowledge, and it must say when the information is not there.
How it works
Your documents are imported and read once: the assistant extracts the key information (specifications, steps, criteria) and makes it searchable. For each question, it finds the relevant passages in your documents, then writes an answer from those passages only, citing the source.
Tuning by role matters as much as the technology: the same information is not presented the same way to an after-sales technician and to a salesperson.
How to choose
- Sourced answers: every answer should link to the document and page, so it can be checked
- Admitting ignorance: the assistant should say when the answer is not in your documents, rather than make it up
- Tuning by role: after-sales, sales, order desk and engineering do not expect the same answer
- Confidentiality: where is your data stored, is it isolated, is it used to train models?
- Reversibility: can you get your data back without a penalty?
- The full price: subscription, setup, usage, additional seats
What a rollout looks like
The safest approach is to start small: a demo on a few of your documents, then possibly a pilot on part of your documentation with one team. You judge on the evidence, with the questions your teams really ask.
With Lumina, the demo takes 30 minutes on 5 to 10 of your PDFs, and the pilot 6 weeks. Setup covers importing your documents and tuning the assistant to your roles.
What not to expect
A documentation assistant does not replace missing or wrong documentation: it makes it accessible. That is also why unanswered questions are valuable: they show where the documentation needs to be completed.
Nor does it replace engineering expertise. It takes away the questions whose answer is already written down.
See Lumina answer from your own documents.
A 30-minute demo on 5 to 10 of your PDFs, prepared in advance.
How the demo works
You request a demo
The form takes a minute.You upload 5 to 10 PDFs
Through a secure link we send you.30 minutes on your documents
We prepare them beforehand and show you the result.