Changing the Documentation Workflow for Good with Paligo

Speech Processing Solutions is an international technology company and global leader in dictation solutions with over 65 years experience. More than four million users worldwide work with their speech-to-text solutions sold under the Philips brand. Philips is the leading solution provider for all speech-to-content needs, such as software, hardware, and services.

Before Paligo, Speech Processing Solutions used static PDFs. This meant that when one change needed to be done, it needed to be done manually in many different documents – and also in every required language.

When I started at the company, we had a complex system of Adobe InDesign files. So for example, for the VoiceTracer 2019 Audiorecorder product range this was the process:

• To make changes, I had to open a master file (with conditional text) and make changes there.
• From this, create the PDF Output for the two different manuals.
• At the same time, manually keep track of the translations, so which paragraphs were changed.
• Next, send the necessary translations manually to the agency (we did try sending an InDesign format to make this easier, but it didn’t work so well).
• After receiving the translations, manually paste in all 14 translation documents (the manual is in total available in 14 languages).
• Create PDFs from the master file and upload them.

Additionally, there were no analytics, since it’s a PDF document. So we only saw the total downloads, but not how chapters were performing.

Another prominent example of the problems they were having is with their SpeechMike Dictation Microphone product range. It is a wide product range, resulting in many accompanying user manuals in multiple languages. The user manuals had a high quantity of reused content. When they moved to Paligo, they could (for example) make changes to the Certifications section for a whole product range in one place. Before that, they would need to open around six documents (for every language) for every product variation in that product range.

With our Dictation and Transcription Software SpeechExec (which is not yet transferred into Paligo) it’s even more laborious. There are three end-user manuals, for Basic, Pro and Enterprise. But the content is mostly the same. Even though we only have six languages for this product, it means having 6×3 documents to make change every time.

Another considerable issue was the translation process, where separate documents were required for each language, and where changes needed to be tracked. It often required manual copy/pasting (which is risky with foreign languages, especially non Latin-based ones such as Chinese).

Speech Processing Solutions needed a solution which required less manual work and provided maximum automation in their technical documentation. In particular, they needed the ability to automatically export paragraphs for translation. They also needed the ability to track these changes within the tool (without manually keeping track of what needs to be translated). They were also moving away from static PDF content to web based content, expanding the documentation to include animation and videos.

Content reuse was very high on the list of requirements since many manuals shared the same information (not just standard boiler plates but also entire sections in the manuals).

Paligo was able to satisfy all of these requirements, and more.

Content reuse… just makes creating new content, or repurposing old content so much easier.

For Christof, Paligo is a full component content management system (CCMS) in the cloud. And unlike the competition, Paligo enables translation management in a user-friendly way with minimum manual efforts. Other benefits for Speech Processing Solutions were the possibility to publish either HTML, or PDF (for legacy reasons) and also the publishing option to Zendesk.

Content reuse… just makes creating new content, or repurposing old content so much easier. Especially in combination with the handling of translations, which are of course also included when repurposing old content.