This is something that i believe already exists if i knew what "name" to look for. I will try to give a good description of what is needed and hope that someone has seen or heard of such a program.
(Please excuse my order of presentation. I had to add things as they came to mind. I can conceptualize the end result but explaining how I am getting there is not so easy)
The starting premise is this: I need a way to assist a shift manager in writing short nightly reports for what was done each day on their shift.
Let's say I start with 200 different historical "event reports". These are just short descriptions of what the person on duty that night wrote down to explain how their shift passed.
Each of them is similar but each was written from the viewpoint of whoever was on that shift that night. To take this to an extreme example, lets say a shift manager at a restaurant has to write up the events of the final shift at closing every day. Or any other job that would require a descriptive written statement about happenings during a given period of time.
After a few months or years if you read back over these events you can see that with very few changes, they are all extremely similar. I would like to see if there is a way to use a computer program to create a generic "scripted report"" based on the ones written in the hundreds of previous reports. The intent is to assist the person who is writing the new ones by providing a sort of guideline to work with. Of course, there would always be may differences and it isn't meant to replace a real written report for that day.
But it would provide a framework of what COULD have happened and help the person on duty more clearly remember what really did happen on their shift.
I had thought about just pulling up random complete reports and providing one in a side-box to help jar the memory of the person on duty that night. To give them a way to "think". If they see what others said in the past, it will help them visualize what happened during their own shift that occurred at the same place doing the same job but was written up by another person maybe years in the past. But i don't want to risk giving someone a "Play by Play" that they might be inclined to copy outright.
After writing these shift reports for every single day for a couple off years, eventually, anyone doing it will run out of ways to say things. Simple Writers Block! Seeing how another person viewed that particular shift from another point in time I am hoping would give them new ways of thinking about things. Maybe see things from a different perspective. This has become a major issue for this company and the shift managers dread that nightly report which should only take them 5 minutes to write if they could approach the task with some minor coaching in how to say the same things they wrote the day before and all the days before that. Having a "Real Report" written by someone they probably never met but who had to deal with all the same responsibilities and be able to see how That Person wrote about those same events, i believe this would help build new insights and broaden the vocabularies of those who do it.
Additionally, if i could find the right software. One with enough AI components that could reconfigure the previous reports in such a way as to intelligently interchange some of the phrases and other statements, it would at the least create enough unusual errors to possibly cause some real creative thinking.
By the way, this is an "Actual Problem" that I am looking for an "Actual Creative Solution" to. The people involved always eventually get to where they say they just cant think of anything "New" to say that they haven't already said a thousand times before. My idea may be a total flop but i would be willing to take the time to enter a few hundred of these reports and see if maybe being able to see the way their predecessors saw things a year or two ago could be, if nothing else, a way to broaden their viewpoint and vocabulary.
This would all be done in text. No "voice to text" capacity involved. The reports are never more than a couple of short paragraphs and to be honest, YES, they ARE very boring . There are only so many ways to say "Nothing eventful happened". But there is always something that does happen no matter how small. And Corporate requires them to write these things even if no one ever reads them. I feel that by offering a view on how others saw things and how they wrote them up might be worth a try.
It would work like a "Daily Quote". Only one "report template" would be presented each night. I am hoping that this in itself would create enough of a "puzzle" for someone to try to see how the random report from years back or even better , a report that would be created by the system from combining several of those on file, would make a stimulating challenge out of what is now a dreaded task.
If anyone has any ideas of how this could be accomplished i would appreciate the replies.
