GrammarlyRecently introduced a newAI FeaturesThis new feature is designed to review your business writing before you send it and provide "strategic recommendations" to make your message clearer and more impactful. Whether you're writing in a Gmail label, a word processor, or a chat tool like Slack, this new feature is designed to detect when you've roughly finished a piece of business writing. Grammarly's AI can then provide suggestions and suggested rewrites for parts of your writing, such as highlighting the most important points in a long message, adding a clear call to action to a sales email, or remembering to thank your team for their hard work in an internal note.
It's part of Grammarly's effort to move away from just spelling, grammar, and overall wording advice to more sophisticated advice based on the content and context you're writing. The company has already introduced AI features that can instantly draft and edit text based on prompts. Now, Grammarly has perfected large-scale language modeling AI and other systems that can quickly trigger suggestions when appropriate, similar to how writing software might automatically pop up spelling and grammar suggestions. While it's also possible to turn to a general-purpose AI system like ChatGPT for writing help, the Grammarly system is specifically trained for business writing and designed to be used directly in the software where people do their writing.
Nick Stanford, Grammarly's product manager, said, "We're trying to make it as seamless as possible for users, without having to develop new habits or anything else."
In one demonstration, Stanford showed users the software's suggestions for a sample e-mail that a salesperson might draft, including how to make the message more persuasive and the date and time of the call that would contain the particular suggestion. As with any other suggestion, the user can decide whether to take the suggestion or continue to fine-tune the suggested changes.
In the future, Stanford said, AI may be able to access more contextual information, such as extracting calendar information to know when a user can attend a meeting.
The AI system was trained based on Grammarly's extensive anonymized commercial writing data. Stanford says the data in the training set has been stripped of identifying information and other details to prevent unintentional privacy invasions, while built-in security features prevent the AI from providing inappropriate advice or helping to refine objectionable writing. The AI should only get better as Grammarly learns what advice users actually accept.
Stanford said he imagines these new strategic suggestions will be used in a variety of different contexts, from helping junior employees still learning how to write professional communications to reminding busy managers to make sure the key points of their messages stand out. Different customers may have different ways of evaluating whether the suggestions are useful, such as whether they increase sales or reduce the need for follow-up emails, and Stanford said Grammarly's main focus is whether users find the tool useful based on any criteria they might use.
He said, "At the end of the day, our main concern is our users' perception of how helpful this tool has been."