We talk to a lot of teams about content design. Some have an entire dedicated function, some have a sole writer at the reins, some have to share the workload of product copy across PMs, designers, and developers. But no matter the sophistication of their content design function, we consistently hear the same concerns:

• How can I actually make copy consistent, when there’s so many people involved?
• Our team has a content style guide, but it just sits as a PDF on my desktop…
• I can’t be everywhere all the time, how can I be confident that the “final product” actually meets our copy standards?

We hear you loud and clear. The teams we work with have tens of thousands of words in their product, and they’re shipping new features every day. It isn’t reasonable to think we can ensure consistency, enforce guidelines, and ship with confidence every time.

That is, without the right tools.

New AI Capabilities in Ditto

That’s why we invested in the newest toolset in your Ditto workspace: Build your own AI Content System with AI-enforced Style Guides, and Ditto’s Magic Edit.

Build out your copy style guidelines right in Ditto, then let AI enforce rules, suggest copy improvements, and make edits. Build your style guide in the place the content is actually being worked on to make your content style guides usable, and turn AI into your greatest copy sidekick.

Step 1. Build out your custom style guide

The best way to get the best results from AI is to invest in a detailed system up front. AI requires a lot of instructions; the more detail, the better.

In Ditto’s Style Guides page, you can build out your team’s copy rules for AI to enforce. Add new rules, provide examples, and mark rules with Ditto tags to target rules for copy with those specific identifiers.

AI suggestions will be influenced by how well your rules are written. So, to get the best results from Ditto’s AI, here are a few tips:

• Rule names should be concise, direct instructions: "Use X instead of Y"
• The more concrete the rule, the more successful the output will be: "Don't say please" will be more predictable than "Use an assertive tone"
• Descriptions are your place to provide context on how the rules should be used. Think of the rule  description as direct instructions to follow — the more descriptive you can be, the better.
• Adding target tags will build on the metadata you already have in Ditto: By associating rules with tagged copy, you can ensure you’re getting the most relevant suggestions, where you need them most.

Step 2. Add examples alongside rules, to train your models

Just like giving context to a team member, providing examples for each rule helps give concrete guardrails for Ditto’s AI models to make more accurate, helpful suggestions.

Here are a few best practices for providing examples to train your AI models:

• When writing dos/don’ts, ideally provide multiple, meaningfully differentiated examples to cover different use cases
• For vocabulary, formatting, and general best practices, we’d recommend that you only provide the do examples and skip the don’t

Step 3. Present your Ditto style guide to your team

Once you’ve built out your team’s style guide in Ditto, it’s time to roll it out to the team. Since Ditto will be making suggestions as your team writes, it’s important to make sure they know where the suggestions come from. Run through your style guide, collect feedback, gather opinions, and gain consensus on the standards you’ve set.

Ditto’s Magic Edit will surface the specific style guide rules that triggers the suggestions it makes, to reinforce the style guide while your team is working. So by building consensus early, you can make sure your team understands the feedback and can put the style guide into action.

Step 4. Review content suggestions in context, with Magic Edit

Edit and enforce your content rules, just by drafting in Ditto. Ditto’s Magic Edit will make suggestions to the text in your project, based on the style guide rules you’ve built out, and surface the specific rules that it used to make the suggested edit.

Let your team accept or reject suggestions right in-line, and then keep writing. This way, Ditto handles the first round of reviews for you, so you’re not playing grammar police or tweaking punctuation. Let Ditto do the cleanup, and then jump in to have the strategic feedback sessions alongside your team.

Step 5. Customize style guides for specific use cases

Once your team has gotten the hang of your core content system, you can build on the sophistication with additional style guides for specific use cases. Need to enforce rules for a specific brand in your product portfolio? Or, do you need to hold the copy to different standards on user-facing screens? No problem, there’s a style guide for that.

Build out additional style guides and apply them to specific projects in Ditto. This way, you can customize your content system and enforce different standards, without confusing your team or getting lost in the details.

Some Ditto workspaces create custom style guides for…

• Voice and tone for each product brand
• Error states and alert notification language
• Inclusive and gender-neutral content guide
• Accessibility and readability standards

Consistency, enforcement, confidence — these aren’t new priorities for content designers. Ditto has existed from the start to be the single source of truth for product copy; to provide one centralized place to draft, review, and ship.

But AI has unlocked a whole new way to think about consistency at scale. By leveraging AI as a tool to enforce the system you’ve built, you can have more confidence in the end product, without having to burn yourself out trying to review everything yourself.

Content designers have a massive opportunity with AI, leveraging it as a crucial tool to take some busywork off our plates, so we can get back to the important work.