Elizabeth Dark on accessibility, AI’s role, and the human touch in Multitone’s innovation
Elizabeth Dark is one of Multitone Electronics’ newest recruits, joining the company last year as Junior Technical Author. Elizabeth is responsible for creating and maintaining detailed technical documentation for Multitone’s diverse range of communication solutions. Her role is to ensure clarity and precision in conveying essential information to both Multitone’s global base of customers as well as its internal teams.
Since joining Multitone, Elizabeth’s focus has been to work on the company’s latest and most exciting project – Multitone Nucleus™. Recently, we caught up with Elizabeth to ask her about the new critical communications solution, which is at the forefront of innovation, and was launched this spring.
Making documentation accessible and understandable
Elizabeth, in your role how do you ensure that the documentation you create is easily accessible and understandable for all target audiences?
Elizabeth: Generally, connecting with our audiences has been the most helpful technique, so being able to attend site visits has been essential. In addition to the end users, there has also been interest from the sales teams in more video guides to help them understand how to demonstrate or set up a product. I would love to make more of these.
The increasing potential of artificial intelligence
What key design and development choices contributed to Multitone Nucleus™ user-friendliness and adaptability for the target industry sectors?
Elizabeth: Multitone Nucleus™ is a communication management system intended for critical industries. This product delivers next-level customisability and adapts to a wide range of communication needs, while maintaining a design that users can easily use and understand. This product succeeded because we approached its development differently in several key ways. In particular, the modularity of adding optional features, and extra effort in the user interface design have streamlined use and setup for everyone. Put simply, this product is straightforward and ‘to the point’ so that users waste no time sending out critical messages and alerts, while still allowing customisable flexibility to make it a perfect fit for all sorts of industries and users.
The importance of the human element in communication
How relevant is AI to your work as a technical author?
Elizabeth: AI can be useful for some aspects of documentation work, but most of my work is that of a communicator rather than a copywriter. AI relies on its previous exposure, so when working with internal-only documents or brand-new products – especially hardware – it’s often more effective for me to use my own skills to gather notes, engage with product experts and other resources, create diagrams and images, develop document structures, and produce videos.
Especially for such critical and lifesaving information, I am not comfortable relying on AI too much in this context. However, as someone who is still relatively new to this industry, AI can help me quickly grasp unfamiliar concepts in a general way by elaborating on things in a sort of ‘custom’ context. This way, I can approach product experts with some knowledge already rather than going in blind and expecting them to start explaining it from the absolute beginning.
There are many existing ways to introduce automation techniques into documentation, such as investing in structured/xml style authoring. This can be used to increase efficiency, organisation, and to keep all relevant documents up to date at once without compromising on accuracy or human led information control. This change would require overhauling the process significantly and making a substantial financial investment.
Major incident alert: critical communication solutions saving lives
In addition to Multitone Nucleus, which other Multitone solution most excites you – and why?
Elizabeth: All Multitone products help save lives. What could be more exciting and motivating? My personal favourite is the MAJAX – Major Incidents feature. MAJAX is capable of sending out major incident alerts to large quantities of personnel and teams all at once and using data visualisations to convey essential response data back to the system operator. People use this in situations such as large traffic emergencies, terrorist events, and hospitals. The introduction of this feature streamlined emergency interventions for large emergencies exponentially.
What future developments and considerations regarding security and expanded applications are particularly important in the evolution of critical communication solutions?
Elizabeth: Adapting to security threats. Mismanaged security and targeted attacks in these sectors could be completely disastrous, so security must be at the forefront of our attention for every product. As technologies advance, we must always stay ahead. I am interested in exploring how we can protect encryption against quantum computing risks and how we can continue building and maintaining customers’ trust in cloud storage solutions.
I would really like to see some more focus on extending critical communications scope to home care patients. Being able to improve care communications outside of hospitals would help to give patients some independence back and improve the continuity of care.
Thank you Elizabeth.
