The AI craze has been going on for the last two years. During that time, we’ve seen AI used in a plethora of ways, including fraud detection, pricing optimization, and predictive maintenance. There’s even an AI to find other AIs. At PubNub, we do none of those things, though you may have noticed an AI component being used on our main and docs websites. Don’t know what I’m referring to? Read on.
PubNub’s expertise lies in pure, unadulterated data. Not only can we send, receive, and modify it in the time it takes sound to travel about 33.76 feet / 10.29 meters (look it up) but we can also help you analyze your audience, make informed decisions, and change your app in real time. It sounds great; however,like learning any new technology, it does require a time investment in order to understand the intricacies of PubNub and how to build your solution. This means you will get to know our PubNub documentation over the course of your implementation, and there’s nothing developers love more than reading docs, right?
The Challenge of Effective Documentation
The docs get you up and running as quickly as possible, but even with this guidance, tackling a complex problem can sometimes feel like searching for a byte-sized needle in a digital haystack. In those moments, wouldn’t it be cool to have a PubNub expert lend a hand with coding?
As tech writers at PubNub, we know you’d rather focus on coding and building cool stuff than read our awesome docs about how to build cool stuff. We try as much to make our products and APIs easy to use, but some amount of documentation is always necessary—how else would you know about the quadrillion parameters the JavaScript SDK constructor takes or what the maximum allowed integer value of the custom field in App Context is? By the way, it’s 9007199254740991.
What we think is not necessary is spending too much time browsing through the docs to find that one page that answers your question. That’s where AI comes into play. We’ve partnered with Inkeep to create an AI assistant that you can communicate with using natural language. The AI assistant has been trained on multiple sources of information about PubNub to answer your questions and help you get unstuck. It’s like having a software architect available on speed dial 24/7. For the Gen Z's in the audience, speed dial was a thing back when phones were actually used to call people.
Lifelong (Machine) Learning
Moreover, the assistant keeps learning! Unlike other AI models that have knowledge cutoff dates, our AI assistant updates its database with each documentation change, so rest assured that whatever you ask the assistant, it is the latest and greatest in PubNub. You can use the assistant to help you get started, fix your code samples, provide a link to a documentation resource you’re desperately looking for, or write code from scratch in your language of choice.
We shouldn’t forget about one thing, though—the AI assistant is just a machine. It’s not omnipotent (yet), and it makes mistakes (maybe humans and machines are not so different after all). Should the AI assistant not answer your question or get it wrong, feel free to provide feedback about the quality of help you’ve received. We frequently inspect the input data analytics and identify knowledge gaps, so if anything in the docs is unclear or missing, we will be notified about it. It will end up on our plate to make something clearer, improve searchability, or add the missing piece of documentation. To use the software architect analogy again, if the assistant fails to help you, it will take detailed notes of whatever it was that didn’t help and pass those notes to us.
The Journey So Far... And Beyond
We first implemented the assistant back in 2024, so it has been out for a while. Since then, it has exchanged well over 5,000 messages with the website visitors and we’ve noticed a drop in support tickets compared to the same timeframe last year. We consider the AI assistant rollout a success not only because of those numbers but also because we seem to have started a trend!
If you haven’t already, give the assistant a try. You can find it on the main PubNub website and on the Docs pages at the bottom—simply click the Ask AI bubble and it’ll open the chat window. You can also click the looking glass icon and switch between the search and AI assistant modes.
Hopefully, you find the assistant a useful and convenient tool. If you have any ideas on how to make it better, let us know. Use the controls in the chat window, or simply tell the assistant what it could do better, and we’ll take it from there.
