Intro

Whenever possible I use AI when I expect to save time. Not being a native English speaker, and maintaining a blog where I often publish live examples of Captivate’s output, it helps me designing text-based content for those examples while providing some keywords. In Photoshop and Illustrator I always have been enjoying the AI-based workflows. I love Adobe Express for features like creating a speaking avatar based on written text, and Firefly for graphics.

Warning

More recently everyone has heard about ChatGPT, and is using one or more engines to find more elaborate answers to questions than is possible with old Google.

I often chat with Copilot in Edge. I write this short post to express a warning. I have tried out other engines based on ChatGPT but I like the fact that the answers here offer the URLs of the used resources. Although you may have to offer specifications to get the answer you want, some chatting will provide what you want …. EXCEPT in case of a drastic makeover like what happens with the change from previous Captivate Classic to the present New Captivate, now in version 12.2. In many cases you’ll get a wrong answer because the resource database available world wide for this new version is very small. Copilot will often find only support resources for previous versions and will base answers on them. If you don’t see the URLs to check, this is very confusing and misleading. Here are two examples I checked out for this blog post. I mentioned explicitly the version number as context in the question.  I post the examples in the sequence I used. As expected (look at the second answer) the agent being AI it learned from its first big error.  

Questions

Question 1: Does Adobe Captivate version 12 have text to speech?

This is a screenshot of the first answer. But this is the completely outdated answer you would have gotten:

Of course I knew that this feature was not available at all. There are not even Slide Notes, and NeoSpeech died.

The used resources were all official: Adobe Captivate forum, eLearning community and the official Help documentation. 

After some re-education (my bad…) through chat a more appropriate answer was given.  I asked than for another question and learned that the re-education was not adequate.

Question Two: How to use Bookmarks in Captivate 12.2?

I have been posting blog posts about this topic, so it would clarify how up to date Copilot's database is. FYI: my blog is amongst their resources. Just try to ask anything about the now lost Shared Actions in former versions.

Answer below probably due to my 're-education'?:

Copilot still apologizes for the first wrong answer, but apparently is still confused about the version numbers and now tells me that this is another missing feature. Whereas I already posted three blog posts explicitly about Bookmarks in New Captivate (one is waiting for moderation here as well since weeks).  So, I continued the re-education, sent two URLs for two posts. Result is still bit annoying, because there are still some links to the official documents about older versions where bookmarks as frame navigation are limited to video slides only:

This happened after my detailed explanation about the changes with bookmarks from Captivate Classic to New Captivate. Only then a full search has seemed to happen.

Conclusion

Careful with answers from ChatGPT about software problems, especially with a new version like Captivate. When I was a student, I always preferred professors who did freely tell not to be able to answer immediately, but would be looking it up. ChatGPT too often proclaims to know an answer to every question, which is clearly not the case.

What is your opinion?

Intro

This is a second post about bookmarks in New and Classic Captivate. I hope you have read the introduction, where I explain the terminology and show a Captivate tutorial with examples of static and dynamic bookmarks:

Intro to Bookmarking

New Captivate - version 12 - has only static bookmarks, but they are available on all content slides, with the exception of question and score slides. Captivate Classic has static bookmarks only on slides with slide video. However using micro-navigation (based on available system variables) you can mimick bookmarks on all slides, and also create dynamic bookmarks. Dynamic bookmarks are created on runtime and not available in New Captivate.

In this first part of bookmarking, I treat the topic from its original view: to navigate within a project on the level of frames.

New Captivate also has the possibility to use Bookmarks as events to trigger an (inter)action. That is an improvement over Captivate Classic which has only the Delay command to mimick that behavior. Again, this is limited to static bookmarks. I will publish some examples of bookmark-triggers in a second part.

Example in New Captivate

Scenario

After the title slide you’ll see:

1. A list of explanations of the Steps. Appearance of each step is controlled by the user with a Continue button This slide uses bookmarks for that reason, but the original idea to use those bookmarks as navigation target from the last slide did not work. I am waiting on an answer from the team, logged a bug. Their use as event trigger has been used, but will be explained in a later blog.
2. A video slide (slide video). On top you’ll find three buttons which allow to jump to bookmarks within the same slide. One of the buttons is the Replay button.

Example project

Workflow step-by-step

Bug warning

When you open a project which has a slide video slide where the video duration is longer than the default 3 seconds duration of the video placeholder, the time ruler will disappear and be replaced by an emoticon:

Luckily it is easy to solve, just move the zoom slider and the time ruler will reappear:

Step 1: Create bookmarks

If you know the exact time for the bookmark, you can move the play head near that time. For a video I recommend to use the Play button to get the exact timing. Pause/play using the space bar as toggle is still possible, but not always in a consistent way.

Click the bookmark bar to insert a bookmark which looks like a black diamond. I strongly recommend to replace the generative name by a custom one which will make it easier to find the target bookmarks. Just double-click the proposed name and edit it. In this screenshot you see a bookmark near the start of the slide, which will be used to create a Replay button:

Beware: it can happen that while editing the name that the focus switches from the Properties to the Interactions. In that panel it looks like you forgot to define an interaction for the bookmark. This is a bit confusing because it looks like 'missing'. However a bookmark used as target for micro-navigation doesn't need an interaction. The interaction panel shows all the bookmarks on a slide (bookmarks belong to the group of Slide events) with their timing.

It is possible to move a bookmark by dragging. You can delete a bookmark using the right-click menu.

Step 2: navigation buttons

On top of the video slide I added 3 buttons (it is the maximum in New Captivate within one interactive component). The button functions as trigger for the action 'Jump to bookmark xxxx'. Here is an example screenshot for Button 'Second':

The Replay button will get back to a bookmark at the start of the slide:

The Steps slide with the explanations has 5 bookmarks:

As you could read in the scenario, I meant to have 'Jump to Bookmark' as target bookmark from the video slide. But at this moment that is not working. The jump is replaced buy Go to Previous slide.  I hope this will be fixed soon.

You may wonder why there is a fifth bookmark at the end?  Its action is 'Go to Next Slide' to mimick the smooth transition to the next slide which was typical for all previous versions. Using the On Exit slide event is not working. I am not the only user to have found this workaround. Personallty I never have liked the PPT-like presentation playbar.

The other 4 bookmarks are using the frame event to trigger an interaction. In this first part I restrict to the bookmarks in their original meaning: as navigation targets.        

Comparison New/Classic

Advantage of New Captivate: you can use bookmarks on all content slides except quiz slides. 

For Classic Captivate bookmarks are limited to slides with Slide video.  For other slides you need 'micro-navigation'. Next blog post will explain the workaround by replacing the same scenario. I may provide the shared actions to mimick the bookmark navigation on non-video slides.