13 AI Tools for Technical Writers that aren’t ChatGPT

Many people who share advice on how to implement AI into your workflows go on to mainly talk about using ChatGPT. While ChatGPT is a great application, it’s far from the only solution out there providing value to technical writers. To stay competitive and grow alongside new technologies, documentation teams need to keep up with the various tools and use cases that will optimize their daily life and enhance team productivity.

Read on to explore the various ways technical writers are using AI technology to their benefit. Then uncover four categories of AI applications and the top tools for technical writers within each type.

Note: This article was written in April 2025, so please note that the functionalities of the tools listed below may have evolved since publication.

How do Technical Writers use AI?

AI applications are an inevitable reality of 2025. They’re everywhere, and this isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary, there are several ways that AI tools can provide value to technical writers throughout their missions. Fluid Topics’ Head of Product Knowledge, Rémi Bove agreed, stating that “technical writers can significantly benefit from AI technology to improve their workflows, boost efficiency, and generate top-notch content”. The key is to find the balance of task automation without sacrificing quality, accuracy, or expert details. Below are just some of the many AI applications for tech writing teams.

• Speed up content production: Generative AI (GenAI) tools provide a quick way to brainstorm ideas, summarize expert research documents, and prepare documentation outlines. By giving AI the preparation work, tech writers can spend more time on high-value tasks like creating and updating content.
• Reduce translation costs: Teams can render content available in more languages by combining machine-assisted translation with AI-enabled translation. The result is on-the-fly translation of any document into any language the moment a user requests it.
• Enhance content consistency: With the multiplication of authors contributing to documentation, AI tools are useful for reviewing text. They instantly suggest modifications to improve the content consistency, tone, complexity, and grammar. This streamlines the documentation workflow for tech writers, optimizing their tasks and improving the time to publication.

13 AI Tools for Technical Writing that aren’t ChatGPT

If you’re looking to expand your AI tool stack beyond ChatGPT and to automate tasks, you’re in the right place. Read on to discover our top 13 tools and their features.

Conversational AI Agents

To kick off the list, we have some tools that are conversational AI applications, much like ChatGPT. However, the tools below offer unique capabilities beyond natural language generation that distinguish them from the rest.

1. Claude AI

Claude is an AI assistant developed by Anthropic to create text, generate code, explain complex topics, provide step-by-step instructions, and more. It boasts itself as a safe, accurate, and secure tool to simplify routine tasks so users can focus on more complex, valuable tasks.

Key features:

• Multimedia Content Generation: Claude generates various types of content including text documents, images, and code. This versatile tool lets users translate notes, transcribe writing on an image, create websites in HMTL and CSS, generate code debugging explanations, and more.
• Project Management: This tool lets users launch and manage new projects on Claude’s professional accounts. They can upload documents like customer call transcripts and survey results and let Claude analyze and extract key insights.
• Seamless Collaboration: This solution makes it easy to add colleagues to projects, share generated chats with others, and send messages in real time. Brainstorming, sharing knowledge, and learning from teammates is easier than ever.

2. Perplexity AI

Despite being another conversational agent, Perplexity doesn’t want you to think it’s simply there to generate answers to questions. This AI tool brands itself a “Swiss Army knife for information discovery and curiosity” thanks to its algorithm that gathers knowledge from the latest internet sources to provide accurate, detailed answers.

Key features:

• Internal Knowledge Search: For enterprise accounts, administrators can add up to 500 company files (XLSX, PPTX, DOCX, PDF, or CSV) to supplement Perplexity’s knowledge from public internet sources. These retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) searches combine insights from the web and internal documentation to improve answer relevance and improve decision making.
• Custom Pages: This tool lets users turn subjects into formatted articles, guides, and reports. After adding a search topic, Perplexity instantly generates an article which users can then customize and edit to reflect the information they want to share and the tone they want to use. They can then add their own images before sharing the content with their audience.
• Focused Results: Perplexity’s Focus feature allows users to filter results by type of source to save time and improve relevance. The Focus options include All, Social, Video, Writing, Academic, and Math. As a result, users get targeted results.

AI Content Creation and Editing Tools

New AI content creation platforms are helping technical writers take their documentation to the next level with multimedia content that engages users in new ways. No need to become a graphic design expert, these tools are user-friendly with high-quality results.

3. Canva

With over 30 billion designs created by over 220 million monthly active users, Canva is a global leader in online design. While not solely an AI tool, Canva’s Magic Studio offers several AI-powered tools to enhance teams’ creative endeavors, creating professional designs without advanced graphic design skills.

Key features:

• Photo to Mock-up: At the time of publication, this feature is not yet live but coming soon. This tool allows users to upload images and get instant mockup templates showing various layouts and image placements. For tech writers, this simplifies the process for creating engaging user guides and automates time-consuming activities so they can focus on writing.
• Magic Resize: Users can easily convert content into new formats, languages, and dimensions to ensure documentation is available for all users and device types. This tool allows users to not only resize visual content for any channel but also transform entire pieces of content, say from a detailed maintenance guide to a help desk article.
• Video Highlights: This feature turns long explanatory videos or walkthroughs into short, engaging clips that you can integrate into each user manual step for a better user experience. Canva’s video highlights do just this, suggesting snappy clips to extract from full-length footage.

4. Filmora

Filmora is an intuitive tool to help teams create video content even if they don’t have production experience or skills. Creators of all levels can turn their ideas into professional-grade reality with a suite of AI tools and user-friendly functionalities. With this tool, tech writers can show live demonstrations of complex maintenance procedures or provide step-by-step installation instructions to consumers at home.

Key features:

• AI Text Editing: This AI text tool generates automatic captions based on a video’s audio. If there are any mistakes or customizations needed, users can easily edit the text. And to serve international clients, teams can seamlessly translate captions and audio with voice cloning to maintain consistency.
• Smart Short Clips: With smart clips, users repurpose long, one-shot clips into several short videos with the power of AI. Automatically extract key highlights and add voiceovers to enhance value. Once the video is cut up into smaller pieces, users can trim, edit, and rearrange individual clips to customize the final deliverable.
• Background Audio Removal: This tool is key for tech writers who want to integrate videos into documentation, but who need to film on-site interventions or other procedures taking place in noisy environments. They can easily remove the background noise from video or audio files to create clear, quality audio.

5. Snappify

Snappify is a platform that allows users to upgrade technical content and make it more engaging. They help companies create visually stunning code-based presentations and infographics with options to annotate code, highlight code, build a library of code snippets, and more. With this platform, even complex documentation containing pages of code is easy to understand.

Key features:

• AI Explanations: This GenAI feature allows users to automate the creation of code block explanations so that they don’t have to prepare the commentary themselves. For explanations that need more context, writers get an accurate first draft they can edit to add the necessary specifics.
• Custom Annotations: Users can add context and explanations to code blocks to help end users better understand your documentation. Snappify offers a rich-text editor that allows users to add elements like, arrows, ellipses, highlights, and blurred boxes to specific parts of the code.
• Premade Templates: Users can start designing and customizing instantly by simply choosing a premade template that aligns with their goals and company branding. From there, users can easily add images, elements, and multiple code snippets to the template.

AI Writing Optimization Tools

Everyone makes typos and writes sentences that sound great in their heads but need clarity once on paper. Leave these simple tasks to AI writing assistants that run real-time checks and sentiment analyses to improve writing.

6. oXygen Positron AI Assistant

oXygen’s AI Positron Assistant is an add-on solution for those already using oXygen XML aimed at supporting technical authors throughout the content production process. This AI tool streamlines technical writing by helping teams generate, rework, research, and summarize content in addition to various AI assistance features that enhance the writing and review processes.

Key features:

• AI Edits and Fixes: Writers will streamline the content review process with Oxygen’s AI-Fix tool which identifies and modifies validation issues. This solution also checks for grammar and spelling errors, offering smart solutions to improve and harmonize text. With this feature, get to the publishing phase faster so consumers can benefit from your documentation sooner.
• RAG Responses: Oxygen users can harness the power of RAG to generate accurate, product-specific responses, summaries, text suggestions, and more. With an initial overview prepared, technical writers simply have to review the text, adding in final details or precisions.
• Vision Model Support: Oxygen’s AI Positron Assistant supports Vision models to allow users to read and understand images. This supports tech writers by optimizing DITA content creation as it allows them to precise the context, prompt, and images when generating drafts.

7. Acrolinx

Acrolinx is an AI-powered content governance solution that ensures content adheres to a team’s defined standards for quality, consistency, and tone. From specific terminology to clarity, inclusivity, and tone of voice, Acrolinx ensures any author within a company produces quality content that follows an organization’s writing guidelines.

Key features:

• AI Writing Assistant: This GenAI tool creates, summarizes, and expands on text to help facilitate the content writing process. Plus, every suggestion is crafted in line with a company’s unique content standards.
• AI Guardrails: Using AI tools may be a big trend, but users shouldn’t let it come at the cost of their content governance. Acrolinx offers users a full suite of solutions that help teams ensure any AI-generated text they include in their documentation is compliant with their enterprise standards.
• Easy Integrations: Companies can seamlessly integrate and access Acrolinx’s AI tools from dozens of repositories, workflows, file systems, and websites. This makes it easy for teams to get quality recommendations no matter which tools they prefer for writing content.

8. Congree UCC

Congree UCC is a platform that helps companies create unique corporate content. This solution not only proofreads text but provides real-time documentation compliance checks to ensure all content aligns with company specifications and guidelines. The goal is to help teams develop more quality-assured text, faster.

Key features:

• AI Terminology Development: This feature uses GenAI to help brainstorm term proposals and develop a terminology database for technical writers. The databases include definitions, synonyms, and links to help documentation teams build vocabularies.
• GenAI Text Suggestions: The platform’s Authoring Memory feature combines GenAI and linguistic intelligence technology to provide text suggestions that allow writers to reuse past, approved text formulations. Content reuse reduces production time and costs for both writing and translating documentation.
• Language Model Customization: This solution provides teams with various assets from style guides to vocabularies, Authoring Memory to suggest text, and text corrections. Congree UCC promotes these resources to help companies train and customize language models for their internal writing specifications. This renders AI-generated text more accurate, requiring less adjustments.

9. Grammarly

Grammarly is a well-known writing assistant that checks for content errors, typos, and optimization opportunities in real time no matter where the user is writing. Authors can customize the tool to adjust to their target writing styles and tone. Grammarly also allows documentation teams to add technical jargon to the solution’s dictionary, so key terms aren’t flagged as errors.

Key features:

• Grammarly Go: With this AI-powered feature, writers can select a section of text and a pre-defined AI prompt (e.g., improve this text, make it sound more professional, simplify this text, etc.). Grammarly then reworks the paragraph with its own ideation of how to adjust the text according to the selected prompt.
• Real-Time Text Suggestions: The core feature of Grammarly is its live checks and recommendations to fix spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors as well as style and tone adjustments while authors are writing. When technical writers fix mistakes as they go during the writing process, the initial content draft needs less editing, saving time in later workflows.
• Readability Scores: This feature provides writers with a reading level score that indicates how easy or difficult their text is for end users to understand. It determines the score by looking at sentence length, word choice, and global readability. This is a critical insight for technical writers who need to create documentation for different user types, each with different levels of technical expertise.

10. DeepL Write

DeepL expanded their offer from DeepL Translator — a widely-used tool — to add a writing assistant. DeepL Write Pro refines writing with AI-powered suggestions and edits. It also reworks content for new formats, helping writers turn the content of emails, reports, and presentations, into documentation.

Key features:

• Automatic Text Improvement: Writers get AI-powered text enhancement suggestions to upgrade their clarity and quality. Plus, to seamlessly integrate this into writing workflows, teams can implement DeepL Write into different writing platforms, including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
• Customized Communication Style: This product offers several options for writing styles (e.g. simple, business, academic, casual) and tone (e.g. enthusiastic, friendly, confident, diplomatic). This allows authors to tailor writing suggestions to their style guidelines.
• Best-in-class Security: DeepL Write is GDRP, ISO 27001, and SOC 2 Type II compliant. By adhering to leading security and data privacy standards, writers can rest assured their confidential content will remain protected. The product also specifies that it never stores data without consent or uses data to train its AI models.

Technical Writing and Content Publishing Tools

The above tools are great for getting started, brainstorming, working with subject matter experts, and creating multimedia content. Now, we’re at the heart of technical writing: tools for creating and publishing structured technical documentation.

11. Fluid Topics

Fluid Topics is the leading AI-powered Content Delivery Platform (CDP) that aggregates and unifies all product and technical knowledge, no matter the initial source or format. Whether it’s structured DITA, product PDFs, Word files, HTML, Markdown, OpenAPI specs, or beyond, everything is brought together into one centralized repository. Once consolidated, Fluid Topics dynamically delivers the most relevant content to any digital channel, device, or application, tailoring the experience to match users’ contexts, needs, and environments.

Key features:

• Seamless Content Aggregation: Coordinating content from multiple authoring tools with varying output formats is often tedious. Fluid Topics streamlines this process by automatically harmonizing diverse content types into its platform, eliminating the need for manual reformatting and freeing up valuable time for tech writers.
• Continuous Publishing: Static documentation is outdated, rigid, hard to update, and slow to adapt. Make the switch to dynamic content with continuous publishing, which lets teams automatically publish approved content anytime. Continuous publishing ensures tech writers can always keep users informed with the latest product updates without relying on the IT department.
• Consistent Content Delivery Across Platforms: As content consumption spreads across an ever-growing number of endpoints, technical writers face the challenge of delivering the right information in the right format to each one. Fluid Topics makes it easy to deliver consistent, accurate information to any channel, be it a documentation portal, chatbot, website, or support channel. Users get the information they need exactly where and when they need it.

12. Paligo

Paligo is a leading Component Content Management System (CCMS) that offers topic-based authoring with single-sourcing documentation reuse. This Docbook-based solution is a tech writer favorite for developing technical documentation, training support, policies and procedures, and other product knowledge content.

Key features:

• Structured Authoring: This tool keeps technical writers focused on creating content without worrying about layout or formatting. Paligo offers predetermined components to create structured content, facilitate documentation reuse, enhance consistency, and lower costs.
• Content Reuse: An essential CCMS feature, content reuse means tech writers create and have access to a library of their pre-approved content components. These content blocks are available in multiple formats for easy use in any documents. Authors don’t need to start from zero for each piece of content.
• AI Assistant: This tool is built into the Contributor Editor. The AI Commands offer tech writers targeted suggestions to improve, shorten, lengthen, simplify, or summarize content. The Generate feature uses OpenAPI to create new content on any topic.

13. Heretto

Heretto is another top CCMS and popular choice for information development teams across industries. Their DITA-powered content operations stack helps technical writers create documentation with features like content reuse, version control, and real-time collaboration.

Key features:

• Structured Content Lifecycle Management: Teams use this tool to manage the full scope of their content production thanks to this tool’s intuitive interface. The platform is cloud-based, making it an ideal choice for large-scale collaboration. Finally, structured content writing and history logs help teams manage documentation.
• Content Governance: Heretto makes it easy for teams to produce content that adheres to industry regulations and internal documentation standards with compliance and regulation checks. This tool offers data security with their commitment to SOC Type II compliance and version control management.
• AI Copilot: Etto is Heretto’s AI-powered assistant designed to optimize content creation with intuitive features. Etto combines deep DITA expertise with writing and summarizing text or recommending content edits to scale content production, improve content and brand consistency, boost productivity, and foster customer loyalty.

Note: There are many other top-of-the-line CCMSs available to choose from, including Madcap IXIA CCMS, Tridion Docs, Author-it, Componize, DITAToo DITA CCMS, and Bluestream’s XDocs DITA.

Conclusion

By choosing one or more tools from each section of this “best-of-breed” list, your technical writing team will take their documentation to the next level. Harnessing these AI tools will optimize documentation workflows, enhance the user experience, and boost business ROI.

Technical Writer Tools FAQs

What is Technical Writing?

Technical writing is the act of producing a type of content managed primarily by documentation teams. It involves creating technical and product documents, images, videos, and other formats that explain complex topics to users. Some examples of documentation created with technical writing may include user guides, technical reports, repair manuals, FAQs, and troubleshooting guidelines.

What are the 4 C’s of Technical Writing?

The 4 C’s of technical writing refer to key terms that should describe all pieces of technical content. These C’s are “Clear, Concise, Complete, and Correct”. By keeping these guidelines in mind, technical writers will produce more quality documentation that better serves the needs of customers.

Will AI Tools Replace Human Technical Writers?

In short, no, AI tools will not replace human technical writers. However, the role of technical writers will evolve alongside technology to include new professional skills.

Generative AI tools are only as good as the content that feeds them. Therefore, they need technical writers to connect them to both existing documentation and retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, technology to produce more accurate, product specific content. Even then, technical writers must review all generated outputs to check for hallucinations, add valuable expert context, and make adjustments for document type, user profiles, etc.

Do AI tools Effectively Translate Documentation into Different Languages?

Yes, Generative AI tools can translate any topic or document on-demand, into any language. These tools use vast content repositories to extract and contextualize essential information and terminology. This provides better translations.

Some companies opt for a combination of AI and machine translation. Machine translation uses specifically trained systems to optimize translations for the world’s most common languages. Teams can supplement this with AI translation to offer content in a wider range of languages since AI tools translate text in real time, the moment a user requests documentation in a specific language.