We explored 15 original AI innovation concepts for O’Reilly’s online platform. From this bank of initial proposals, two were selected for further design refinement and development as fully realized products.
Enabling programmers and authors to access a wealth of coding knowledge by bringing the knowledge to them.
HONORING AN ARCHIVE OF EXTENSIVE LEARNING MATERIAL
As a leading voice in digital technology literacy, O’Reilly was uniquely positioned to create AI functionality in an educational context. Its expansive pool of resources spanning books, tutorials, and training programs presented an opportunity to innovate new AI-driven learning experiences that centered their learners’ personal journey while staying true to their roots and values.
MEETING PEOPLE WHERE THEY WORK
How can we better bring the wealth of O’Reilly's learning resources into the everyday tools that programmers use? Early explorations around this question resulted in 15 prototypes. Working with the client team, we selected 2 that would be developed into custom VS Code extensions.
INTERFACE 1: INLINE READING SUGGESTIONS
The code editor is a sacred space that one would have to step out of to look up questions or reference codebases. Inline reading suggestions gives programmers direct access to the online learning platform, providing value to users in the context of their work environment.
HIGHLIGHTS AND WALKTHROUGH
Programmers discover learning materials related to their code without context-switching. This is especially great for those who need to brush up on an existing piece of code like large engineering teams that onboard new developers frequently.
Start with installing the Inline Reading Extension in VS Code. Click on the O’Reilly icon to access it in your project.
The selected line or snippet of code is sent to ChatGPT, which scopes the concepts to the programming language.
The Miso Ask API references the entire content library on O’Reilly’s online learning platform to return a list of topic suggestions.
Learners have the option to read through the list of suggestions in the sidebar or navigate to the learning platform for more focused reading.
“The goal is to give users what they need when they need it. This reduces the need for them to look for information outside the platform.”
INTERFACE 2: PROMPT LIBRARY
Turning one piece of content into multiple formats can be a time-consuming task, and something LLMs are very well suited to address.
After an author is done writing a chapter, they could use this extension to turn it into various formats, including a 2000 word article, a summary, a twitter thread, or even the script of a tutorial.
MAINTAINING AUTHOR EXPERTISE
The collection of predefined formats is available for public use through a Github repository . This enables an ecosystem around prompting content data specifically for O’Reilly. Authors can review the generated content, and make edits before it’s committed, ensuring they maintain ownership over content that is published under their name.
Install the Prompt Library Extension in VS Code. Click on the O’Reilly icon to access it in your project. Select all the text you want to reformat.
Choose specific topics from the markup text as well as the number of topics that need to be included in the reformatted text.
Tweak the prompt to fit the desired tone of voice and cadence.
Changes made to the repository will automatically update the extension.