Gitbook’s AI Integration with Addison Schultz at OSS Seattle 2024

This is Textron tv Everybody. We are here at Open Source Summit in Seattle, Washington. I'm joined by Addison Schultz, who is developer relations with GitBook GitBook.

Okay. Got me right? You had me at gi.

Yeah, so I went and learn no more. Let's, uh, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah.

What GI Book does. Um, yeah, thanks for, thanks for having me and thanks for having us here. Um, so yeah, my name's Addison.

I run our developer relations team at GI Book. We are a documentation platform. Um, you can really make or create whatever type of documentation you want in our platform, whether it's like API docs, product docs, uh, just technical docs or just technical knowledge in general.

We provide all the different tools that let you, um, yeah, create really beautiful and, and, uh, interactive, interactive docs. Um, one of the reasons that we call it GitBook is because we work off the notion of Git branching and the way that you would work in Git. Um, you can also synchronize your documentation on GitBook with a GitHub or GitLab repository.

So if you already have your docs, um, you know, elsewhere, you can import them. Um, but the cool part is it's not like, uh, one way import so you can sync it completely so your engineering team could still work directly in, uh, inside of GitHub, make commits and make pull requests, and those changes are gonna be reflected inside of GitBook and vice versa. Very good.

I should say too, we're both sponsored by North Face. Yeah, Exactly. You know, actually somebody time I stopped somewhere for a coffee and they said, are you from Seattle?

I said, no. Why? Why?

Well, you have a North face on. Yeah, exactly. Colorado.

We have North Face too everywhere. But, um, so, so kind of dive into how does it work, how does the workflow, because you know, back in the day, documentation was that thing we put off to the very end and you know, then we, we went a ways of kind of pulling doc documentation code and make that part of the flow of what we're creating. Yeah.

Um, so the reality is is, you know, documentation is, I think has always been one of those things that's always overlooked in a lot of, uh, in a lot of tools. Luckily, I think a lot of open source projects are probably doing a lot better than that than most teams, but we want to give kind of all the tools to make it really, really easy to get started. Um, so the workflow to create docs, while you can go ahead, log onto the tool and get started right away, um, and start typing, it's uh, uh, what you see is what you get editors.

So you can go ahead and just type whatever you want, but you can also import them, like I said, from like, uh, GitHub, GitLab or a lot of other, um, just text-based formats. So even if you have like a Google doc or a Confluence doc, you can just import it right, uh, into the tool. Very nice.

And then it does some type of synchronization with, uh, whatever repository is gi Yeah, GitHub. Yeah. Because that way, you know, versioning of the documents, it goes with what software.

Exactly. And that's the cool part too, is when you're working inside of GitBook, the way that you would make any changes is you'd first have to create what we call a change request. You'd make a new branch, make your edits, uh, and then we have the whole review process also baked into that.

So we have a, a diff u editor as well. So, uh, you can see what's changed, what's been added, um, and then requests for reviews before merging, merging that in. And that's like Again Yeah.

Sounds like a DE kind of things, right? Very familiar with, Yeah, exactly. So it's really cool because it's the same workflow that a lot of engineering teams have been using for years.

Um, but it's giving that nicer experience to maybe non-technical folks. So you don't have to choose one or the other. You can just kind of work in whatever tool or area that you, uh, you wanna be in.

Is it all browser based or do you integrate into IEDs? How does that All Yeah, so it is browser based. com.

com in general. Um, but the other part of it is we, and the reason that we're here at the conference this, uh, this week is because we've been open sourcing a lot of, uh, parts of our, our product as well. Ah, so the whole front end, the rendering portion of the content, um, that's completely open source that we, we released I think about a month ago.

Okay. And so what, what's, what's the reason or what's the strategy behind why that is the important thing or valuable thing to open source? Yeah, so GitBook has actually been, uh, around for quite a long time.

We've been a company I think about eight or nine years. Um, and we started off completely as an open source company. So it started off as a CLI tool where you would generate kind of documentation right from within your code.

Um, but over the last couple years we've pivoted the, the product to more of a SaaS, uh, based model, um, where you'd log on and you'd create your account that way. But we believe a lot in open source. So we've been partnering with a lot of open source companies in the, in the past couple years, and they've always wanted to kind of get back or figure out how we could transform the, the business a little bit back, back to kind of where we came from.

So, uh, I think it's mostly just because we, it's kind of where we've been coming from and uh, our community definitely is, is very involved in the open source community and for documentation it's huge, A lot more credibility. You've come from that environment versus oh, that's open source. So part of this and okay, are you really into doing the open source model where you just kind of doing it 'cause it might help your business.

Right. Yeah. How about ai?

What's your view on AI and how that might help Us with documentation? So, so we have, uh, a couple actually pieces baked right into the product directly. com, we have a little search box in the upper right and it just works as like a semantic search, but we also have an AI section of it where you can ask questions prompt and get, get results and answers that way.

But the kind of like larger workflow and, and kind of longer term play outside of documentation for us is helping teams manage, uh, technical knowledge at a larger scale. And that can mean a lot of different things, not just like public docs or product docs, uh, but things like company handbooks or technical, you know, workflow docs for engineering teams. Um, so a lot of teams are using us for things like the product docs, but they also have like their company handbook or engineering practices also within their internal, uh, GitBook space.

And we have a lot of kind of AI features related directly with that as well. Um, I think it's pretty cool. One of the features we've been working on the last couple months, we call content audit.

So if you have a list of different spaces as we call 'em or different pages inside of GitBook, um, you can have those indexed and analyzed by our AI model, um, and it will take a look and say, Hey, you actually mentioned one thing in this engineering handbook, but you mentioned something else here. And it will give you a really, um, kind of like conflict, uh, resolution workflow to say, Hey, which one was right. Also look for things like duplicated information to help you just maintain, uh, maintain the, the accuracy Of everything.

That's handy just right there alone. Yeah, We're, we're seeing a lot of, uh, adoption and obviously we use it iBook internally quite sure quite happy. The other uh, kind of portion of that is not only do we have the, like the searchability on top of the ai, uh, but we also wanna make it easy for people to add technical knowledge to their knowledge bases as well.

We're guilty of it in that we see it a lot, uh, at other teams as well. But a lot of discussions and a lot of knowledge is, is hosted inside of Slack specifically and other kind of, you know, tools, right? So a lot of, um, a lot of decisions are made, a lot of, uh, resolutions are made inside of Slack and instead of, you know, making a Jira ticket or a ticket for someone to say, Hey, document this or write this down later, we have a Slack bot that will go ahead that you can call inside of a Slack thread.

It'll analyze the whole thread, uh, and add it to your knowledge base in like a, a really nice sum summarized version. Kind of clean it up and Exactly. And then you can continue to use GitBook, uh, like native blocks and the more interactive experiences to, to edit it and then add that to, uh, to whatever page it it belongs to, uh, later.

So it's that whole flow of getting and curating, uh, knowledge and then also making sure it's always staying up to date. Cool. You know, uh, folks also are using JGPT or Copilots for like, explain this code, tell me what this code does.

Yes. Do you see that? Is that already part of what you do or?

Yeah, so I think, um, so it definitely is a part of it as well. 'cause we have this whole AI model also that will help you generate the content too. So if you're just typing something, you can uh, fire up the ai, uh, editor and it will ask you, you can say like, oh, can you explain this?

Can you finish this sentence? Or like, can you make this sound a little bit nicer? But the other part is you can also do things like translations as well.

So, which is really helpful, especially for product docs, if you wanna say, well, I'll write this once, but then translate it into, uh, you know, whatever languages. Then there are, you know, there's always esoteric things in code too that um, yeah. You know, if your proficiency level is higher, you might, but yeah, that's simple stuff.

I know that, but not everybody is at that school level too. Yeah. One thing that I'm pretty excited about too, and it's gonna be pretty interesting, is because we have this whole workflow that's based inside of Git and on top of like these more technical workflows, um, you still have that whole editing experience inside of GitBook where you can just use the editor.

You don't need to like, you know, know much about code, but if you are working in that, you can use things like GitHub actions or GitHub workflows to enhance the content and use, you know, other things on Top of that. So you tie those workflow kind of. Yeah.

And you have a lot of flexibility there. I think this is kind of a newer avenue for a lot of, uh, teams who are using GitBook. Um, but I'm pretty excited to see, uh, kind of see where that goes.

Boy, the more you can do it for me, right? Yeah. All the better or make it easy to find what I need.

Yeah, Exactly. You, you know, just ci ICD workflows on top of the content that you're, you're writing. So we wanna make it really easy for someone to hop in, get their mind onto a page and not have to think so much about formatting it or, you know, making sure it sounds good because we have a lot of tools out there that are gonna, you know, help you get most of the way there.

Good. So long, long ways from just being an editor. Yeah, Yeah, exactly.

From the outside I would say it kind of, it just looks like an editor, but there's a lot more that's baked, uh, under the skin. Yeah. Good.

Edison's, great talking with you and, uh, we, we wish you the best of continued success with it, the option of, uh, get book Yeah, thank you. And evolving it, you know, making it easier for all of us. Thank you very much.

com or you can check out, uh, the open source repository I was talking about. Just get book on, uh, on, Have free accounts or things in. Yeah, so that's the other thing.

You can sign up for a free account automatically. Um, if you're working on a team, we introduce a paid kind of tiered license, but we actually give free licenses for open source projects in general. So any open source project out there, um, feel free to reach out and we'll, we'll get you hooked up.

Fantastic. Always helpful. Alright, thanks Addison.

Yeah, Thank you for having me. Be sure and check out GI book. We are, uh, going to continue.

I think we have a couple more, maybe one or two more interviews here at Open Source Summit, so we'll be back. So some more great folks to talk to.