Introducing Vidocu Pulse: Documentation That Keeps Up

Introducing Vidocu Pulse: Documentation That Keeps Up

Your product changes every day. Your documentation does not.

Today we are opening early access to Vidocu Pulse: a documentation health engine that watches your product and your code, works out which help articles a change just broke, rewrites them, and recaptures the screenshots and the video from your live app. You review what it found and decide what publishes. Nothing goes live on its own.

Pulse is the answer to the question every documentation owner eventually asks: not "how do I write this article faster", but "how do I find out which of my three hundred articles are now wrong".

The problem was never the writing

Nobody lets their help center rot on purpose. It rots because the work of keeping it current is spread across a loop that nothing owns.

Someone has to notice that a release changed the settings screen. Someone has to work out which articles mention that screen. Someone has to rewrite them, take the screenshots again, and re-record the walkthrough video that now shows a button in the wrong place. Then next week, the loop starts over.

Every step in that loop is cheap on its own and expensive together. So it gets deferred, and the gap between what the product does and what the docs say opens quietly. You usually find out from a support ticket.

Writing tools do not fix this. A tool that drafts an article faster still needs a human to notice the article needed drafting. That noticing step is the one Pulse automates.

How Pulse works

Four steps. You only do the fourth one.

Step 1: Connect what you already have

Pulse reads up to four sources, all read-only:

• Your code, through a GitHub App. Multiple repositories are supported, so a separate backend or agent repo can be part of the picture.
• Your live product, walked screen by screen with a saved login session. This source needs no repository at all, which matters if your code is somewhere we cannot read it.
• Your marketing site, crawled from the sitemap, for context on what you claim the product does.
• Your existing help center, so Pulse knows what you have already published.

You do not need all four. The product on its own is enough to start.

Step 2: Pulse finds what changed

Each scan compares what the product actually does against what your documentation says about it. Code and the live app are treated as the truth. Marketing copy is context only, because it describes what you claim, not what ships.

The result is not a vague score. It is a list you can act on: articles to write because a feature has no coverage, articles to update because the product moved, and sections that should exist and do not. Pulse also lays out the structure your help center should have, named the way your own navigation names things, so the gaps sit in a shape you recognize.

Step 3: It writes the update, with evidence

One click turns a finding into a draft. The draft cites the files it was written from, at a specific commit, so you can check the claim rather than trust it.

Then Vidocu signs in to your product, navigates to the screen the article describes, and photographs it. Not a stock image, not the marketing page: the actual screen, including screens that only exist behind a tab, a dialog, or a dynamic URL. Screenshots are the part of documentation maintenance that gets skipped most often, and they are the part users notice first when they are wrong.

Step 4: You review and publish

Every finding, every draft, and every screenshot waits for a person. Approve the ones that are right, edit the ones that are close, and push them to the Vidocu Knowledge Center or straight into Zendesk, Intercom, Notion, Help Scout, Freshdesk, or GitBook.

You keep publishing where your readers already are.

It reads the product, not the docs about the product

This is the design decision everything else follows from.

An AI writing assistant pointed at your existing help center can only reshuffle what is already there. If an article is confidently wrong, the assistant will make it a better written, still wrong article. It has no way to know.

Pulse grounds every finding in the product itself. When the source is code, the writer cites the files behind the behaviour at the exact commit that was scanned. When a draft's evidence is thin, it says so in the draft rather than inventing a button that does not exist. And when Pulse could not do something, it tells you why on the draft: no screenshots because the connected account has no data to show, a flow it could not reach, a label it could not verify. Those arrive as warnings with a link to the fix, never buried inside the article your customers read.

That honesty is not decoration. A documentation tool that quietly publishes a confident guess is worse than no tool, because now nobody is checking.

The screenshots, and then the video

Recapturing screenshots by hand is what turns a fifteen minute article update into an afternoon. Pulse opens your app, walks the flow, and waits for the page to actually finish rendering before it takes the picture. Half-painted screens were the single most common complaint we heard in testing, and the capture pipeline now checks fonts and images before it fires.

The same logic extends to video. Any draft can be handed to the AI Recorder, which performs the updated flow in a real browser and records itself doing it. You get a current article, current screenshots, and a current walkthrough video from one change, instead of a doc that was updated in March and a video that still shows last year's interface.

If you have ever shipped a UI change and then quietly hoped nobody would notice the tutorial video, this is the part to pay attention to. We wrote a whole playbook on keeping tutorial videos up to date when the UI changes every sprint, and Pulse is that playbook, automated.

What Pulse will not do

Some honest boundaries, because they matter more than the feature list:

• It does not publish without you. There is no autopilot mode that pushes to your live help center unattended, and we are not planning one. The expensive part of this job is noticing and rewriting, not clicking publish.
• It is not a replacement for a writer. It is a replacement for the audit nobody has time to run. Judgment about tone, ordering, and what deserves an article at all stays with your team.
• It needs an account with data. Screenshots come from a real signed-in session. If the connected account is empty, Pulse says so on the draft rather than publishing a picture of an empty list.
• It works on web products. The app walker drives a browser, so a desktop-only application is outside what it can see today.

Who this is for

Pulse pays off fastest where documentation volume is high and release velocity is higher.

Technical writers and documentation teams get the quarterly audit they never quite schedule, delivered as a list with the drafts already written. See how the rest of the workflow fits together for technical writing teams.

Product teams get docs that follow the release. The pull request that changed the settings screen also produces the finding that the settings article is now wrong, in the same week.

Support and customer success teams get fewer tickets caused by their own documentation. Screenshots that match the current interface remove an entire category of confused question before it is asked. That is the same lever behind our work on customer success workflows.

Engineering teams connect the repository once and stop relying on anyone remembering to file a documentation task.

Where this sits in Vidocu

Vidocu already turns a recording into an article, subtitles, voiceover, and translations. Video to documentation covers the creation side, and video to SOP covers process documents specifically. The AI Recorder removed the need to record the flow yourself, which we announced in July.

Pulse closes the loop on the other end. Creating documentation was never really the hard part. Keeping it true is.

If you want to drive any of this from your own systems, everything Pulse produces is reachable through the Vidocu API.

How to get Pulse

Pulse is in early access. It is switched on per workspace by our team rather than bought from the pricing page, because the setup involves connecting your repository, your app, and your help center, and we would rather do that with you than leave you guessing.

Request a demo and we will run Pulse against your product and show you what it finds. Most teams are surprised by the coverage gaps more than the stale articles. The articles you know about. The missing ones are invisible until a ticket arrives.

FAQ

What is Vidocu Pulse?

Pulse is a documentation health engine. It connects to your product, your code, and the knowledge base you publish today, then works out which articles no longer match reality. It writes the updates, captures fresh screenshots from your live app, and can re-record the walkthrough video, so your documentation keeps up with the product instead of falling a release behind.

How does Pulse know my documentation is out of date?

It scans up to four sources and compares them: your repository through a read-only GitHub App, your signed-in product walked screen by screen, your marketing site, and your existing help center. Code and the live app are treated as the truth. When the product does something your articles do not describe, or your articles describe something the product no longer does, that becomes a finding you can act on.

Does Pulse publish changes to my help center automatically?

No. Pulse produces findings and drafts, and a person reviews and publishes them. That is deliberate, and it is not a limitation we plan to remove.

Do I have to connect my source code?

No. The app walker crawls your signed-in product and needs no repository at all, which is what makes Pulse usable on products whose code we cannot read. Connecting a repository makes the drafts stronger, because the writer can cite the code behind a behaviour instead of inferring it from the screen.

Which help centers can Pulse publish to?

The Vidocu Knowledge Center, plus Zendesk, Intercom, Notion, Help Scout, Freshdesk, and GitBook. If you are choosing a home for your documentation, our AI knowledge base generator builds one from your existing videos.

How much does Pulse cost?

Pulse is in early access and is enabled per workspace, so pricing is part of the conversation rather than a line on the pricing page. Request a demo and we will walk through it with your product in front of us.

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Documentation does not go stale because people are careless. It goes stale because noticing, rewriting, and re-screenshotting is a week of work that nobody has after a release.

Don't maintain your help center. Let it maintain itself.

Try Vidocu for free, or request a Pulse demo to see it run on your product.