Grammarly

Last updated

Grammarly
Original author(s) Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider [1] [2]
Developer(s) Grammarly Inc.
Initial releaseJuly 1, 2009;15 years ago (2009-07-01) [3]
Operating system Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, various web browsers
Available in
Type Online text editor, browser extension, and mobile app with grammar checker, spell checker, and plagiarism detector
License Proprietary software
Website grammarly.com

Grammarly is a writing assistant. It reviews the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing as well as identifying possible instances of plagiarism. It can also can suggest style and tonal recommendations to users and produce writing from prompts with its generative AI capabilities.

Contents

Grammarly was developed in Ukraine and launched in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko  [ uk ], Max Lytvyn  [ uk ], and Dmytro Lider. It is available as a standalone application; a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox; and as an add-on for Google Docs.

Grammarly is developed by Grammarly Inc., which is headquartered in San Francisco [4] and has offices in Kyiv, New York, and Vancouver. [5]

History

Grammarly was founded in 2009 by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider. [6] The company initially offered a subscription-based product intended to help students improve their grammar and spelling. [7] That product was subsequently developed into a writing assistant that checks the grammar, spelling, and tone of a piece of writing. [7] [8] [9]

By 2015, Grammarly had one million active daily users. [10] That same year, it began offering its flagship product via a freemium model that allowed all users access to the product's basic capabilities while placing more sophisticated features like style recommendations and plagiarism detection behind a paywall. [11] [12] It also launched a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, as well as an add-on for Google Docs. [12]

In 2017, Grammarly raised $110 million in its first funding round. [13]

In 2019, Grammarly added a tone detector to its writing assistant. This tool uses set rules and machine-learning to help users gauge the character of their writing and tailor it to a particular audience. [14] [15] That same year, the company held a second funding round, raising $90 million. [12] In 2020, Grammarly made its first investment in an outside company, participating in a $10 million funding round for Docugami, a company working on AI-driven document generation. [16] In 2021, Grammarly raised another $200 million, at a total valuation of $13 billion, via its third funding round. [17] By this point, Grammarly had approximately 30 million users. [18]

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Grammarly ceased all business operations in Russia and Belarus. The company also announced that it would donate all the net revenue it had earned in Russia and Belarus since 2014, about $5 million, to Ukrainian humanitarian groups. [19] [20] Additionally, the company paid the salaries of Ukrainians who left their jobs at Grammarly to join the nation's army [21] and made its product free for Ukrainian journalists publishing news about the war in English. [19]

In April 2023, Grammarly launched a product using generative AI built on the GPT-3 large language models. [22] The software can generate and rewrite content based on prompts. [23] It can also generate topic ideas and outlines for written content such as blog posts and academic essays. [24] It has been trained on an anonymized library of business writing and is capable of suggesting clarifying edits and additions to work communications such as emails and chat messages. [25] In September 2024, Grammarly announced the release of its Authorship tool, which attempts to identify the original source of a passage of text. It then designates the passage as written by the text's author, lifted from another source, or generated by AI. [26] [27] It's not clear to what extent such tools work. [28] [29]

In July 2024, Grammarly donated approximately $500,000 to help rebuild Okhmatdyt children's hospital after the building was damaged by a Russian missile strike. [30] [31]

Vulnerabilities

In early 2018, Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google who was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team, [32] discovered a severe vulnerability in Grammarly's browser extension, which exposed authentication tokens to websites and potentially allowed them to access the users' documents and other data. [33] A few hours later, the company released a hotfix and reported that it found no evidence of compromised user data. [34] Later in December, Grammarly launched a bug bounty program on HackerOne, offering a US$100,000 reward to the first white hat hacker to access a specific document on the company's server. [35]

Reception

Reviewers have praised Grammarly for its ease of use and helpful suggestions, considering it worthwhile despite its relatively high price and lack of offline functionality. [36] Conversely, some users have criticized Grammarly for incorrect suggestions, ignorance of tone and context, and reduction of writers' freedom of expression. [37] [38]

The result of using Grammarly has occasionally been accused of being AI-generated by detection engines such as Turnitin. [39] Schools are struggling to develop rules about its use that are consistent and fair, with some teachers recommending Grammarly to all of their students and others rejecting it. [40] [41]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yandex</span> Russian multinational technology company

Yandex LLC is a Russian technology company that provides Internet-related products and services including a web browser, search engine, cloud computing, web mapping, online food ordering, streaming media, online shopping, and a ridesharing company.

Anthropic PBC is a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) public-benefit startup founded in 2021. It researches and develops AI to "study their safety properties at the technological frontier" and use this research to deploy safe, reliable models for the public. Anthropic has developed a family of large language models (LLMs) named Claude as a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canva</span> Online graphic design platform

Canva is an Australian multinational software company that provides a graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, postcards, promotional merchandise and websites. Launched in Australia in 2013, the service offers design tools for individuals and companies. Its offerings include templates for presentations, posters, and social media content, as well as functionalities for photo and video editing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quizlet</span> American online studying platform

Quizlet is a multi-national American company that provides tools for studying and learning. Quizlet was founded in October 2005 by Andrew Sutherland, who at the time was a 15-year old student, and released to the public in January 2007. Quizlet's primary products include digital flash cards, matching games, practice electronic assessments, and live quizzes. In 2017, 1 in 2 high school students used Quizlet. As of December 2021, Quizlet has over 500 million user-generated flashcard sets and more than 60 million active users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Similarweb</span> Provider of website rankings and analytics

Similarweb Ltd. is a global software development and data aggregation company specializing in web analytics, web traffic and digital performance. The company has 12 offices worldwide. Similarweb went public on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Duolingo</span> American educational technology company

Duolingo, Inc., is an American educational technology company that produces learning apps and provides language certification. Duolingo offers courses on 43 languages, ranging from English, French, and Spanish to less commonly studied languages such as Welsh, Irish, and Navajo, and even fictional languages such as Klingon. It also offers courses on music and math. The learning method incorporates gamification to motivate users with points and rewards and interactive lessons featuring spaced repetition. The app promotes short, daily lessons for consistent-phased practice.

Google Drive is a file-hosting service and synchronization service developed by Google. Launched on April 24, 2012, Google Drive allows users to store files in the cloud, synchronize files across devices, and share files. In addition to a web interface, Google Drive offers apps with offline capabilities for Windows and macOS computers, and Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. Google Drive encompasses Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides, which are a part of the Google Docs Editors office suite that allows collaborative editing of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, drawings, forms, and more. Files created and edited through the Google Docs suite are saved in Google Drive.

GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package that can develop, secure, and operate software. GitLab includes a distributed version control based on Git, including features such as access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, and wikis for every project, as well as snippets.

OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. Its stated mission is to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines as "highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work". As a leading organization in the ongoing AI boom, OpenAI is known for the GPT family of large language models, the DALL-E series of text-to-image models, and a text-to-video model named Sora. Its release of ChatGPT in November 2022 has been credited with catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI.

Notion is a productivity and note-taking web application developed by Notion Labs, Inc. It is an online-only organizational tool with options for both free and paid subscriptions. It is based in San Francisco, California, United States.

Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typewise</span> Virtual keyboard featuring hexagonal keys

Typewise is a Swiss deep tech company that builds text prediction AI. In January 2022, the company filed a patent for its technology which it claims outperforms that of Google's and Apple's.

You.com is an AI assistant that began as a personalization-focused search engine. While still offering web search capabilities, You.com has evolved to prioritize a chat-first AI assistant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ChatGPT</span> Chatbot developed by OpenAI

ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It is based on the GPT-4o large language model (LLM). ChatGPT can generate human-like conversational responses, and enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It is credited with accelerating the AI boom, which has led to ongoing rapid investment in and public attention to the field of artificial intelligence. Some observers have raised concern about the potential of ChatGPT and similar programs to displace human intelligence, enable plagiarism, or fuel misinformation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AI21 Labs</span> Tel Aviv-based company

AI21 Labs is an Israeli company specializing in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which develops AI systems that can understand and generate natural language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gemini (chatbot)</span> Chatbot developed by Google

Gemini, formerly known as Bard, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Google. Based on the large language model (LLM) of the same name, it was launched in 2023 after being developed as a direct response to the rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It was previously based on PaLM, and initially the LaMDA family of large language models.

Wordtune is an AI powered reading and writing companion capable of fixing grammatical errors, understanding context and meaning, suggesting paraphrases or alternative writing tones, and generating written text based on context. It is developed by the Israeli AI company AI21 Labs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">AutoGPT</span> Autonomous AI agent

AutoGPT is an open-source "AI agent" that, given a goal in natural language, will attempt to achieve it by breaking it into sub-tasks and using the Internet and other tools in an automatic loop. It uses OpenAI's GPT-4 or GPT-3.5 APIs, and is among the first examples of an application using GPT-4 to perform autonomous tasks.

Inflection AI, Inc. is an American technology company which has developed a machine learning and generative artificial intelligence hardware and apps, founded in 2022. The company is structured as a public benefit corporation and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perplexity AI</span> AI search engine

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer queries. Its developer, Perplexity AI, Inc., is based in San Francisco, California.

References

  1. ↑ Krasnikov, Denys (July 6, 2018). "Grammarly opens new Kyiv office as demand rises for help with English". Kyiv Post . Businessgroup LLC. Archived from the original on August 28, 2018. Retrieved September 6, 2019.
  2. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (September 12, 2018). "Grammarly brings its AI-powered proofreading tools to Google Docs". VentureBeat . Archived from the original on September 9, 2019. Retrieved September 6, 2019.
  3. ↑ "Grammarly.com WHOIS, DNS, & Domain Info – DomainTools". WHOIS . Archived from the original on April 19, 2019. Retrieved August 27, 2016.
  4. ↑ Li, Diana (May 17, 2024). "Grammarly Wants to Expand Its AI From the Classroom to the Office". Bloomberg. Retrieved December 2, 2024. Grammarly Inc., a software company known for its writing assistant, is expanding its artificial intelligence offerings in the workplace... The move is part of San Francisco-based Grammarly's effort to ride the generative AI wave and pivot from a grammar-and-spelling checker to a corporate communications and workflow tool.
  5. ↑ "AI-powered writing assistant Grammarly opens new office in downtown Vancouver | Venture". dailyhive.com. Archived from the original on September 14, 2019. Retrieved November 19, 2019.
  6. ↑ "Grammarly brings its AI-powered proofreading tools to Google Docs". VentureBeat. September 12, 2018. Archived from the original on May 16, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2021.
  7. 1 2 McEvoy, Jemima (November 23, 2021). "Grammarly Founders Become Billionaires From Fixing Your Sloppy Writing". Forbes. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  8. ↑ McCracken, Harry (April 1, 2019). "On its 10th anniversary, Grammarly looks way beyond grammar". Fast Company. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  9. ↑ Sullivan, Mark (March 19, 2024). "How Grammarly's AI is writing the new rules of writing". Fast Company. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  10. ↑ Krasnikov, Denys (July 6, 2018). "Grammarly opens new Kyiv office as demand rises for help with English". Kyiv Post. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  11. ↑ "Two of Grammarly's founders now billionaires with net worth of $4 bn each". Business Today. February 9, 2022. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  12. 1 2 3 Wiggers, Kyle (October 10, 2019). "Grammarly raises $90 million for AI that spots grammar errors and plagiarism". VentureBeat. Retrieved September 19, 2024.
  13. ↑ Roof, Katie (May 8, 2017). "Grammarly raises $110 million for a better spell check". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  14. ↑ Lardinois, Frederic (September 24, 2019). "Grammarly gets a tone detectorto keep you out of email trouble". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  15. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (September 24, 2019). "Grammarly uses AI to detect the tone and tenor of your writing". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  16. ↑ Bishop, Todd (May 13, 2020). "Grammarly makes first investment, taking stake in Seattle document engineering startup Docugami". GeekWire. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
  17. ↑ Podder, Sohini (November 17, 2021). "Grammarly raises fresh funds at $13 billion valuation". Reuters. Retrieved September 23, 2024.
  18. ↑ Wiggers, Kyle (November 17, 2021). "Grammarly raises $200M to expand its AI-powered writing suggestions platform". VentureBeat. Retrieved September 28, 2024.
  19. 1 2 Lila MacLellan (March 4, 2022). "Ukrainian-founded Grammarly is donating all the money it made in Russia since 2014". Quartz. Archived from the original on February 13, 2023. Retrieved December 9, 2022.
  20. ↑ Renbarger, Madeline. "'We feel frustrated': Startup CEOs with teams in Ukraine struggle to help their employees in any way they can". Business Insider. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved March 7, 2022.
  21. ↑ Anand, Priya (March 21, 2022). "Grammarly Continues to Pay Staffers Who Joined Ukrainian Army". Bloomberg. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  22. ↑ Hamish Hector (March 9, 2023). "Grammarly's ChatGPT upgrade won't just improve your writing, it'll do it for you". TechRadar. Archived from the original on May 7, 2023. Retrieved May 7, 2023.
  23. ↑ Akuchie, Michael (March 16, 2023). "GrammarlyGo: Everything You Need To Know About The AI Writing Assistant". ScreenRant. Archived from the original on May 7, 2023. Retrieved May 7, 2023.
  24. ↑ Chedraoui, Katelyni (June 11, 2024). "Did Apple Intelligence's 'Rewrite' Tool Just Kill Grammarly?". CNET. Retrieved September 23, 2024.
  25. ↑ Melendez, Steven (March 26, 2024). "Grammarly's AI can now offer suggestions to make your work messages clearer". Reuters. Retrieved September 23, 2024.
  26. ↑ Whitney, Lance (August 15, 2024). "Grammarly to roll out a new AI content detector tool. Here's how it works". ZDNet. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
  27. ↑ Contreras, Brian (August 14, 2024). "This New Grammarly Tool Aims to Tell If AI Wrote a Document". Inc. Magazine. Retrieved October 8, 2024.
  28. ↑ Coffey, Lauren. "Professors Cautious of Tools to Detect AI-Generated Writing". Inside Higher Ed.
  29. ↑ Fowler, Geoffrey A. (April 3, 2023). "We tested a new ChatGPT-detector for teachers. It flagged an innocent student" . The Washington Post .
  30. ↑ Lytovchenko, Viktoria (July 10, 2024). "UAH 300 million was raised for "Okhmatdyt" hospital's reconstruction". Online.UA. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  31. ↑ "In less than two days: UAH 300 million raised to rebuild Okhmatdyt". Ukraine Frontlines. July 10, 2024. Retrieved October 29, 2024.
  32. ↑ Greenberg, Andy (July 15, 2014). "Meet 'Project Zero,' Google's Secret Team of Bug-Hunting Hackers". Wired.com. Archived from the original on January 5, 2015. Retrieved January 4, 2015.
  33. ↑ Ormandy, Tavis (February 2, 2018). "Issue 1527: Grammarly: auth tokens are accessible to all websites". project-zero. Google. Archived from the original on January 4, 2023. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
  34. ↑ Couts, Andrew (February 5, 2018). "Grammarly Bug Let Snoops Read What You Wrote, Typos and All (Updated)". Gizmodo. Archived from the original on January 13, 2021. Retrieved August 1, 2021.
  35. ↑ "Grammarly - Bug Bounty Program". HackerOne. March 2022. Archived from the original on March 15, 2023. Retrieved July 22, 2022.
  36. ↑ Moore, Ben (July 6, 2020). "Grammarly Review: A slick writing assistant for all your documents". PCMag. Archived from the original on April 10, 2021. Retrieved May 27, 2021.
  37. ↑ Mayne, Dorothy (January 26, 2021). "Revisiting Grammarly: An Imperfect Tool for Final Editing". another word. Archived from the original on February 19, 2022. Retrieved February 19, 2022.
  38. ↑ Brogan, Jacob (February 7, 2018). "Grammarly Fixed a Security Vulnerability, but It Still Can't Fix Our Writing". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on December 15, 2022. Retrieved December 29, 2021.
  39. ↑ Young, Jeffrey R. (April 4, 2024). "What happened after this college student's paper was falsely flagged for AI use after using Grammarly". Fast Company . Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
  40. ↑ Menezes, Damita (March 4, 2024). "Student fights academic probation for using Grammarly". The Hill. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
  41. ↑ Tang, William. "She used Grammarly to proofread her paper. Now she's accused of 'unintentionally cheating.'". USA TODAY. Archived from the original on April 25, 2024. Retrieved April 25, 2024.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.