Transcript
Introduction to the Merlin Document Writer
Hey, everyone. Thank you for joining today’s webinar. My name is Dylan Manfredi. I’m a software engineer here at Power Monitors, and today we’re gonna walk through one of the newest features in PQ Canvas, the Merlin Document Writer.
Here’s why this one is interesting. Most of you are probably already familiar with Merlin. It can take a power quality recording and analyze it, finds disturbances, ranks them by severity, checks them against standards, and so on. And that’s a huge time saver.
But when the analysis is done, there’s almost always one more thing you have to do, and it’s the part that probably nobody here enjoys. You still have to write something up. That can be a letter to the homeowner, a summary for management, or a response to a regulator, and those are all written for very different readers. None of them is a power quality engineer, and the document writer is the piece that takes the analysis you already have and turns that into a finished audience-ready document. And that’s what I’m gonna be showing you guys today, mostly by building one live.
What the Document Writer Does
So we have an example recording here. We’ve done some runs with it before, and so we’re gonna be using just this example recording. It has some flicker. But before I really dive into that, let me just talk a little bit more about what the document writer does for us.
Think about the time that goes into an investigation. The technical part of figuring out what happened is the part that most of you here are what you’re trained for. But then you have to translate that into plain prose for somebody who isn’t an engineer, and some of these can be kinda delicate.
Picture a finding where the cause is on the customer’s side of the meter or a fix that’s going to fall on them. Now you’re writing a letter that has to be honest about that without accusing anyone, and without the utility having to sign up for a problem that isn’t their own. Getting that wording right is more than worth it, but it’s time-consuming, and so we’re gonna generate one of those examples.
Navigating to the Document Writer
So here on this recording, it’s in a very familiar spot if you’re familiar with our chat bot. It’s now been folded into that same area, so chat has been renamed to assistant. So we’ll go here. And again, familiar interface, but we’re on default here on chat, but what we care about is up here.
If we look in the top left, we have documents, reports, templates. So we’re gonna go to reports, and we’re gonna talk a little bit about templates in a second.
Reports and Templates
Let’s talk a little bit about what actually goes on inside the document writer. We have our reports and our templates. Templates are the way you can structure your report, ’cause in a lot of the cases you might have a standardized way to speak with the user. And if you wanna encapsulate that for future use, that’s what the template creator and what templates are for.
We have a variety of standard templates we’ve made. These are here authored from PMI. And you can also have your organization templates. Now, templates are account-wide, so if you make a template for one specific recording, it’s actually for all recordings, so anyone in your account can use these templates elsewhere.
Reports, meanwhile, are scoped to the recording. So these are a few reports we’ve already generated for our example recording here, and if you were to open another analysis, you would not find these same reports there. So just something to keep in mind if you see certain things are missing or are not there. Reports are scoped to the recording. Templates are scoped to your whole account.
Setting the Scene for the Example Recording
So let me set the scene for this recording ’cause it’s a good example. The analysis on the service came back mostly healthy. The voltage stayed well within the normal range the whole time. No outages, no sign of loose neutral. But there was one real issue, some borderline long-term flicker driven by repeated small voltage drops with heavy equipment.
And here’s the delicate part. The flicker leans customer side, and the home shares a transformer with a couple of neighbors. So the homeowner’s called in about their lights flickering, and the utility, we’re gonna call them Acme Electric, has to write back.
Think about what the letter has to do here. It has to confirm the problem is real, it has to reassure the homeowner that it isn’t dangerous, and it has to get across that the flicker is coming from load on their side, not the power that the utility delivers, without accusing the homeowner, and that’s a lot to do inside one letter. So let’s make one.
Creating a Report
So this is the create report screen. We have two columns. On the left I’ll choose the template. We’re gonna go with customer letter, plain language. And your own templates, for example, will also show up in here. So let’s see. Customer letter. Great. And then we’ll talk over these fields.
Report name. It’s a report name. We’re just gonna make that just New Report for Customer. English. And we are Acme Electric. Now we’re gonna provide some additional guidance. The template already knows how a plain language customer letter should read, so the guidance is short. It’s not where I’ll re-explain everything. It’s where I point this run at a specific situation.
So we’re gonna use this specific line of text. I’m not gonna bore you guys typing it out by hand. We’re just gonna copy-paste it in. We’re going to write to the homeowner who reported flickering lights on behalf of the utility. Keep the tone warm, plain, and reassuring, no technical jargon, in everyday terms. We place the monitor on the service and confirm the flickering is real. Explain clearly but gently that the cause is heavy equipment at their own location cycling on and off, not a problem with the power the utility delivers.
Reviewing the Generated Letter
Now, this will take a second, so to make things a little bit quicker, we’re gonna go to reports. I already have one generated right here for us. And so here is the letter. On the left, you can see the recording is what it’s about. It’s the guidance I gave, the template that produced it, and the document itself.
And we’re gonna start out. Again, thank you for letting us know. We explain what we did. We start out with the good news and then we address the customer’s concern. We don’t downplay it. We say in practical terms, “The flicker is real. It’s an annoyance, it’s not a safety issue.” And then we follow up with some guidance.
Importantly, we hit all the notes we need to hit. We talk about their concern. We don’t brush it off. We address the safety, and we, again, gently explain that this is on their side.
Sharing and Downloading Reports
A couple other features. If you wanna share this with somebody in your account, you can get a copy. You can copy it to your clipboard, and anyone you give that link to, they can see it. They have to be a part of your account. This is just for internal referencing. If you wanna show it with a coworker or with management.
You can also download. You can actually upload your logo as well here, so you can have custom branding, and then the rest of the document will be here.
The Template Creator
That’s document creation. Now we’re gonna talk a little bit more about the template creator. I touched on that in the beginning, and now we’re gonna talk about how to create one, because it’s actually rather involved and we give you a lot of options.
We have three options: from scratch, from a template, and from documents. From scratch is, as the name implies, you’re building this from scratch. We default with some presets here, but the idea is that you will go through and select, customize this template to your liking.
Template Configuration Options
Now, there’s a lot of dropdowns here, so I’m gonna walk through each of them one at a time.
- Audience is who this is for. This is kind of a technical level. So you can imagine you could be going towards management, could be legal, a technician, or a residential customer.
- Tone is the voice, warm and approachable or strict and regulatory.
- Document type controls mostly the length. It could just be a short checklist or a full deep dive report.
- Purpose is what is our goal. We could just be summarizing something. We could be responding to a complaint, or we’re trying to support an investigation.
- Complaint handling is are we tying it in, are we trying to mention it, are we organizing around the support.
- Responsibility posture is are we leaning towards utility or are we leaning towards the customer.
Notably, responsibility only ever gets assigned when the recording supports it. These documents have the same exact analysis that we already see from here. This is Merlin at each step of the way. It has all of the context of your recording, and that’s what makes it so powerful.
And then we have our section plan. Merlin will generate its own section plan automatically, but if at your utility you have a specific format, a specific kinda structure to your document, you can create custom sections.
Creating a Template From a Template
Now we’re gonna talk about from a template. Here you can pick one of our preset templates. We’ll do the customer letter. Same one we used to generate a report, and it will fill in with everything that that template came with. So we can see the audience is residential customer. Tone is friendly. It’s a customer letter. We’re answering the complaint directly, and we’re explaining to the customer while keeping a balanced responsibility posture.
And so you might like this, but maybe you wanna be a little bit more utility productive, or maybe you have a custom structure you have in mind and you wanna use that. That’s what this is for, and then you can save this template.
Creating a Template From Documents
Now, we’re not gonna do that just yet ’cause I wanna point out the last way we can generate a template. It’s from documents. At your utility, you probably have already written documents before, and you might have documents that are considered the gold standard within your organization.
You can upload up to three documents. They can be DOCX file, a PDF, or a TXT, and you can upload those, and Merlin will infer from your documents a reusable template. And so it might determine from your templates that you want to be more neutral, or this is for an executive summary, or this is supposed to be professional. It’ll infer that for you.
How It All Fits Together
We’re just going to pick customer letter, plain language, and we’re just gonna say it’s an email instead, just so I can show you guys what it looks like when we go to generate a template. This is the loading screen. It is going to take a second to complete, so we’re just gonna talk about a little bit where all this fits.
The dashboard that we just pointed out shows what Merlin’s found. It’s structured and ranked by severity. Merlin Chat is what lets you dig into the finding conversationally. What caused this? How bad is it? How would we fix it? We covered chat in an earlier white paper. That’s White Paper four hundred and twenty if you want a deep dive on that.
Now, the document writer, which we just used, takes the result and writes it up for a specific reader. So a real investigation moves through all of these. You triage in the dashboard, you investigate a finding in the chat, and then you produce the deliverable, the custom letter, that executive summary right there in the document writer. And because all three are drawing on the same completed analysis, the letter doesn’t drift.
Wrapping Up
That’s the document writer. The way I’d sum it up is it closes the loop on the analysis for communication. The same recording that Merlin analyzes becomes the letter to the customer. It’s summary for management, response to a regulator. Each one is written custom for the reader, and each one is grounded in the recording’s real findings rather than made up.
The templates are what make that repeatable, capture the editorial judgment that’s hard to scale, not the technical content, which the analysis already gives you. It instead captures the tone, the framing, and the tact that it takes to say a difficult thing well.
Template Confirmation
Merlin is finished generating our template. It will give you an interpretation, so it’ll kinda just describe based on your configuration, this is what the template’s going to do. If you did something contradictory in creating the template, maybe we wanted to explain to the customer, but we set the audience to regulators, Merlin would flag that as, “Hey, that’s a little bit odd.” It won’t stop you, and you can go back to edit, but it’ll bring up any of these things that might not make sense.
But we can just confirm the template, and then it’s down here. Of course, you can always delete templates, rename templates, same thing with reports. Rename or delete. So it’s all right here.
Contact Information
All right. I think that just about does it. Thank you all for attending today’s webinar. If you have any questions after this, you can reach us anytime by calling 800-296-4120 or by emailing support@powermonitors.com. Thanks again, and have a great rest of your day.
