There is no guarantee that this software will not occasionally start acting as a keylogger. If somehow this happens, will it be the direct responsibility of the author?
Legally, there is no entity behind that responsible for privacy (1), and honestly, I don't see even minimal reason to trust this software from a legal perspective.
The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence:
> Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice.
In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g.:
> I go to my practice to practise medicine.
The problem I have with this website is that it's entirely concerned with peripheral issues. The product respects my privacy - good. The product is performant - good. The product doesn't require an Internet connection - good. The product works in many writing apps - good. The product has transparent pricing - good. But I don't give a shit about any of this until you convince me that this will consistently do the correct thing, and this website singularly fails to achieve this.
> and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth
What do you regard as the British Commonwealth, and what variant of English spelling to you expect people to use who are not part of this grouping?
Just so that you know, in case you don't, "US English" is used just about exclusively in the US, and UK English is used in most of the rest of the world, despite the fact that most of our devices incorrectly default to US English.
I work at an international organisation, and can confirm. My understanding is that is that at the international level, only the US-based international organisations use US English.
To be sure, I don‘t have any dog in this fight, just highlighting a fact from my experience that many here might not know.
That sounds surprising. As an European, I thought that UK only thinks their English is the dominant one, because it's the one officially taught everywhere. Meanwhile, the reality is, people learn English primarily from Hollywood and MTV; music, video, television and computer games are both the primary exposure and the main reason for people to pick English up, and they're almost all in US English. Secondarily, computers - the OS, software, SaaS - all of that is either in US English or localized to wherever the users live, and even then the US English version is usually better.
Nobody actually uses UK English here, except for English teachers. Computers don't. TV doesn't. Corporate jobs don't. And so regular people don't either.
"Here" is Poland, but in my trips to other places in Europe (and around the world), I never saw anything that would suggest this is an unique experience. On the contrary, it's pretty much self-evident, and having it be otherwise would require the last 200 years of world history to be dramatically different from what they were.
I'm interested in this - I am from the Commonwealth and I do use those words, including when I forget with American colleagues.
It never occurred to me that this could ever be perceived as arrogant (even if only when referring to someone with a different background.) And I wouldn't have thought it would mean anything more than a certain language cosmopolitanism, lah ;) (Hope that joke comes through! It's been decades since I had much exposure to Malaysian English.) Can you explain why this might be, please?
Speaking for myself (an American), when I read published work that uses British spellings and I know the author is American, it feels to me that the author thinks American spellings are somehow vulgar or improper and he/she is trying to rise above our shameful misspellings.
British Commonwealth authors (well, really any author I know to be not from the USA) get a pass because these are the spellings they were taught. Nothing wrong with that.
This is a phenomenon I've only noticed in the last two decades or so. I don't know if American students are now being (wrongly) taught British spellings in school or they merely think their writing will carry more weight if it has a British "accent" but it just seems arrogant to me.
The OED is a useful resource but it is not our dictionary of final arbitration. Americans should use the American Heritage Dictionary.
Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?
I don't think OP meant "arrogant" in terms of more prestigious, but in the sense of any native US-English speaker using British English spellings as a way to seem fancier or more formal.
Non-native US-English speakers are not viewed in the same light (in my opinion).
> English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.
I disagree strenuously with this idea, because it suggests that there is one 'big' English in which anything goes. A better idea is the one of the register[0]: there are many Englishes, many sets of rules. Different rules are used in different regions, by different groups of people, and have different connotations (e.g., the King James Bible was intentionally written in a form of English that was considered archaic at the time because that would make it sound more grandiose).
If I were to use this tool, I'd be using it to ensure that whatever I'm writing is well-received by my intended audience. Because English usage is so varied, I would need to be able to control the register that it uses to ensure that the output is suitable. The fact that the product website doesn't even mention a list of supported languages, let alone supported dialects and registers within those languages, has a very everyone can see what a horse is kind of feeling[1].
If you chose Oxford because of the Oxford English Dictionary, note that it's not regular en-gb, it's en-gb-oxendict. "the OED often favo[u]rs "-ize" (and its derivatives) over "-ise" for words derived from Greek roots, and may also include historical or less common usages."
You still need to adapt it to where you are though, people expect this because it causes misunderstandings. If I as a British person go to the US, I know that I can't ask people to go and buy some booze from the off-license and when finished ask them to put their aluminium can in the bin ready for the rubbish lorry while wearing their jumper because that sounds anachronistic.
I'm American and have no idea what a pinafore or American jumper is. I know a jumper is a hoodie because I lived in Australia a while ago. But that's not a word I ever hear here.
I thought the difference between practice vs. practise was that the latter is British. My spell checker (US English) does not like "practise" though, it is underlined with red. UK English, however, does not underline "practise" with red. So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English? Because based on the spell checker, that seems to be the case.
It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.
Languagetool is an open source tool you can run as a local spelling and grammar checker. It's different to Grammarly - less AI and more rules based. I often use both tools at the same time. I wrote a quick intro on how to self host this - https://martincapodici.com/2025/05/10/check-your-writing-usi....
This is precisely what I've been hoping somebody would build. In my initial testing, it works well. I can even mix sentences with different languages, and it still makes correct suggestions.
The fluency suggestions are seemingly largely malfunctioning. It frequently suggests starting and ending sentences with quotes, although it also makes some useful suggestions. There seems to be an issue with analysis running synchronized, or something like that; when I type into a text field and Refine starts to run, it often blocks text entry. Selecting a suggested replacement blocks the app for half a second or so. Neither of these problems occurs with Grammarly or Language Tool. I also noticed a bunch of issues that Grammarly catches (like verb agreement) that Refine does not.
But this is an amazing first release and extremely promising. Congrats!
Does anyone know how this compares to other products in its field, such as LanguageTool and Harper? LanguageTool can be hosted locally, and Harper runs entirely as an extension, so I'm interested in how the spelling and grammar checks compare.
I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.
Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.
Extra space after periods is never correct with proportionally-spaced fonts, which is why all browsers remove it by default.
Two spaces after periods is a kludge invented for typewriters that had monospaced fonts and touch typing teachers need to stop teaching it in the modern era where most writing uses proportional fonts.
Indeed - especially the space before colons and semi-colons. The space before exclamation marks sometimes happens in informal typing amongst Brazilians. But never the space before colons/semi-colons.
You don't need docker (a Linux-only piece of tech) to run a java application. Even though I'm on Linux, and docker experience is waaaaay better here than on any other platform, I wouldn't in my life consider using it to run LanguageTool.
Well, only Americans use it. There's no point in arguing about it your version of a language is better or worse but for the rest of the world it's incredibly annoying having to correct Zs with Ss when using LLMs or American only software.
I honestly don't think this is true. In many places outside the US our devices will default to US spelling, making it appear as if the language spoken by the locals is US English.
But when you look at things like the type of English being taught in school, or the language used by the government, it'll be UK/International English.
I could care less about this attempt at trolling, but I won't.
We have enough American cultural hegemony as it is. It frustrates me no end that I regularly am unable[1] to configure software to use my preferred version of English.
[1] or it's extremely difficult. CLion I'm looking at you; every available option I have is set to British English, but still you insist on telling me my Colours should be corrected to Color etc. :(
English is a bastard language of French and Saxon. But we don’t get upset over that because Britain made the world English. Now the USA is making the world American. That ship has sailed.
I worry that this will make my writing more likely to fail an AI coursework detector, which could really impact my life. The risk just isn't worth it till someone has tested the output through all the big players (turnitin etc.)
It's hilarious, on some other sites one is immediately accused of using ChatGPT when using the n-dash (–) or m-dash (—) instead of the hyphen (-). Not an issue with the monospaced font here. ETA: I stand corrected.
Seams weird to not have "How does this compare to Apple Intelligence Writing Tools" at least in the FAQ. Maybe refine is better or has more features, but the page doesn't even seem to acknowledge that a system level feature like this exists.
Does not catch a singular/plural discrepancy between the subject and the verb in a sentence--a common mistake when the expressed thought applies equally to one thing or to many things.
Does not catch a missed indefinite article--a common mistake for speakers of languages that don't have articles. Similarly, does not catch the use of the indefinite article for a thing already mentioned before.
Neat idea. I see why the fluency feature is off by default. It constantly rewords things, adds random quotations, or does something pretty silly https://imgur.com/oVSWmtN
The Grammar feature seems to have weird suggestions/cycles too on a little bit more testing. Curious to see how this improves. A local only, one-time-purchase grammarly alternative is appealing!
My biggest problem with Grammarly is how buggy it is. How often it doesn’t work as intended and either messes up formatting or doesn’t change the text when I click.
This phrase is offensive and violates my safety guidelines. Therefore, I will not revise it. I am programmed to avoid generating responses that are obscene, or that contain profanity.
because what's under the hood is this, and prompts are hardcoded
unsloth/gemma-3n-E4B-it-GGUF
You are a precision editor guided by a custom style manual. Your tasks are ordered by priority.
Your primary rule is to consult the provided REFERENCE DICTIONARY. Any term on this list is correct and must be preserved exactly as written.
Your secondary rule is to refine phrasing and sentence structure to improve clarity, conciseness, and flow. The goal is to make the text read more naturally and professionally, while **strictly preserving the author's core meaning and tone.**
Your final rule is to output ONLY the clean, revised text. You MUST NOT add any commentary, greetings, or explanations.
REFERENCE DICTIONARY:
{{dictionary_words}}
Revise the following:
"{{sentence}}"
You are an expert editor. Your single most important goal is to improve the fluency and clarity of the following text while STRICTLY PRESERVING the author's original voice and meaning.
You MUST follow these rules:
1. Only rephrase sentences that are genuinely awkward or unclear.
2. Never make changes for purely stylistic preference.
Return ONLY the clean, revised text.
Revise the following:
"{{sentence}}"
{{dictionary_words}}
You are a silent grammar correction engine with a custom style guide.
Your primary rule is to consult the provided REFERENCE DICTIONARY. Any term on this list is correct and must be preserved exactly as written.
Your secondary rule is to correct all other grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in the main text.
Your final rule is to output ONLY the clean, corrected text. You MUST NOT add any commentary, greetings, or explanations.
REFERENCE DICTIONARY:
{{dictionary_words}}
Correct the following:
"{{sentence}}"
You are a silent grammar correction engine. Your sole function is to receive text and output the corrected version. You MUST NOT add any commentary, greetings, or explanations. You will only return the clean, corrected text.
Correct the following:
"{{sentence}}"
Wonderful! I've given it a go, works in Apple's Notes app, but it does not seem to trigger suggestions in Chrome, Firefox or Slack. It does however highlight misspellings there. Any idea what can I do to enable suggestions there? I was looking for a product like this.
Couldnt make it to show suggestions in vscode/cursor. I would like to use the tool, but i'd expect it to work consistently across all widgets in the system (i.e. like superwhisper). Is there a technical limitation here or my misconfiguration of things?
What I'd be interested in would be something I could host on my local server (e.g. with ollama) to get suggestions on my laptop, where I write typst or markdown with Zed or VSCode.
I'm missing some information on how this works (a LLM? which? Do I need to bring an API key? Does this work offline?) and what I can expect in terms of performance/battery hit.
> Lightning Fast. Local processing means instant results without internet dependency or delays.
> Always Available. Works offline, on flights, in coffee shops, anywhere you write.
Two of your 4 questions were answered in the first content block
It is Gemma 3n, I can't give feedback yet on the battery hit, But I would not expect anything bad as these models have been developed for much smaller devices (Phones)
Isn't privacy a concern? How do consumers ensure that data is not going to captured in a future update without it being open source or having third party security audits?
Theoretically, it could support over 140 languages, as it is powered by the newly released Gemma 3n model. However, I haven’t tested many languages yet.
In upcoming releases, Refine will support custom prompts and BYOK (Bring Your Own Key), allowing you to use any large language model you want.
What's the rationale behind adding BYOK? Or the advantages?
You do realise you're already using an optimised model built for everyday devices, and that model includes some serious innovations in parameter-efficient processing, right?
You're a great developer, and it looks like you're thinking about adding features like BYOK quickly to please more users. But in doing that, you might be missing the real innovation you've already created. You've basically built a version of Grammarly without the privacy issues that make most IT departments ban it.
No one wants Grammarly or your tool sending corporate emails or documents to a language model. Privacy is what sets you apart from Grammarly. It's your biggest feature right now. Add a big table to your site comparing your products privacy with Grammarly's. That's your strongest selling point, and probably the only feature that can truly compete with the big players.
My advice? Keep improving the app, but keep the model local. Keep it private. That's the killer feature you've got.
There is no guarantee that this software will not occasionally start acting as a keylogger. If somehow this happens, will it be the direct responsibility of the author?
Legally, there is no entity behind that responsible for privacy (1), and honestly, I don't see even minimal reason to trust this software from a legal perspective.
1. https://refine.sh/privacy-policy
The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence:
> Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice.
In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g.:
> I go to my practice to practise medicine.
The problem I have with this website is that it's entirely concerned with peripheral issues. The product respects my privacy - good. The product is performant - good. The product doesn't require an Internet connection - good. The product works in many writing apps - good. The product has transparent pricing - good. But I don't give a shit about any of this until you convince me that this will consistently do the correct thing, and this website singularly fails to achieve this.
So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour.
If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.
> and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth
What do you regard as the British Commonwealth, and what variant of English spelling to you expect people to use who are not part of this grouping?
Just so that you know, in case you don't, "US English" is used just about exclusively in the US, and UK English is used in most of the rest of the world, despite the fact that most of our devices incorrectly default to US English.
I work at an international organisation, and can confirm. My understanding is that is that at the international level, only the US-based international organisations use US English.
To be sure, I don‘t have any dog in this fight, just highlighting a fact from my experience that many here might not know.
That sounds surprising. As an European, I thought that UK only thinks their English is the dominant one, because it's the one officially taught everywhere. Meanwhile, the reality is, people learn English primarily from Hollywood and MTV; music, video, television and computer games are both the primary exposure and the main reason for people to pick English up, and they're almost all in US English. Secondarily, computers - the OS, software, SaaS - all of that is either in US English or localized to wherever the users live, and even then the US English version is usually better.
Nobody actually uses UK English here, except for English teachers. Computers don't. TV doesn't. Corporate jobs don't. And so regular people don't either.
Where is "here"?
"Here" is Poland, but in my trips to other places in Europe (and around the world), I never saw anything that would suggest this is an unique experience. On the contrary, it's pretty much self-evident, and having it be otherwise would require the last 200 years of world history to be dramatically different from what they were.
This is my approach/experience as well, hence my comment and question to the previous poster.
Americans finding anyone else arrogant is quite rich.
I'm interested in this - I am from the Commonwealth and I do use those words, including when I forget with American colleagues.
It never occurred to me that this could ever be perceived as arrogant (even if only when referring to someone with a different background.) And I wouldn't have thought it would mean anything more than a certain language cosmopolitanism, lah ;) (Hope that joke comes through! It's been decades since I had much exposure to Malaysian English.) Can you explain why this might be, please?
Speaking for myself (an American), when I read published work that uses British spellings and I know the author is American, it feels to me that the author thinks American spellings are somehow vulgar or improper and he/she is trying to rise above our shameful misspellings.
British Commonwealth authors (well, really any author I know to be not from the USA) get a pass because these are the spellings they were taught. Nothing wrong with that.
This is a phenomenon I've only noticed in the last two decades or so. I don't know if American students are now being (wrongly) taught British spellings in school or they merely think their writing will carry more weight if it has a British "accent" but it just seems arrogant to me.
The OED is a useful resource but it is not our dictionary of final arbitration. Americans should use the American Heritage Dictionary.
Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?
I don't think OP meant "arrogant" in terms of more prestigious, but in the sense of any native US-English speaker using British English spellings as a way to seem fancier or more formal.
Non-native US-English speakers are not viewed in the same light (in my opinion).
Huge quantities of english speakers, who are not from the Commonwealth, learn British English.
That's very colorful[sic] thinking.
I get this.
> ... in 'full fat' English ...
English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.
Setting the bar where it is well written and unambiguously understandable is IMHO completely fine for a 15$ product.
Having a text spell checked to comply with contemporary Oxford English is likely not the goal of this product.
> English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.
I disagree strenuously with this idea, because it suggests that there is one 'big' English in which anything goes. A better idea is the one of the register[0]: there are many Englishes, many sets of rules. Different rules are used in different regions, by different groups of people, and have different connotations (e.g., the King James Bible was intentionally written in a form of English that was considered archaic at the time because that would make it sound more grandiose).
If I were to use this tool, I'd be using it to ensure that whatever I'm writing is well-received by my intended audience. Because English usage is so varied, I would need to be able to control the register that it uses to ensure that the output is suitable. The fact that the product website doesn't even mention a list of supported languages, let alone supported dialects and registers within those languages, has a very everyone can see what a horse is kind of feeling[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowe_Ateny
> contemporary Oxford English
If you chose Oxford because of the Oxford English Dictionary, note that it's not regular en-gb, it's en-gb-oxendict. "the OED often favo[u]rs "-ize" (and its derivatives) over "-ise" for words derived from Greek roots, and may also include historical or less common usages."
You still need to adapt it to where you are though, people expect this because it causes misunderstandings. If I as a British person go to the US, I know that I can't ask people to go and buy some booze from the off-license and when finished ask them to put their aluminium can in the bin ready for the rubbish lorry while wearing their jumper because that sounds anachronistic.
Not too mention that a jumper in the US is closer to a pinafore.
Yes, I'm aware, a colleague moved to Berkeley and relayed a story where he confused a lot of people :)
I'm American and have no idea what a pinafore or American jumper is. I know a jumper is a hoodie because I lived in Australia a while ago. But that's not a word I ever hear here.
I thought the difference between practice vs. practise was that the latter is British. My spell checker (US English) does not like "practise" though, it is underlined with red. UK English, however, does not underline "practise" with red. So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English? Because based on the spell checker, that seems to be the case.
Lets be fair here, this tool is new - the domain was registered on Saturday.
What you suggest does seem like a good early doors feature; but the cut they've made seems to be the right one to prove market potential.
It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.
I have no idea how this tool is better than running local LLM. Should I buy it?
So you’re saying that for most English speakers it was correct, and that’s a problem?
There are many different Englishes. I would bet that this tool does not handle Indian or Malaysian dialects.
British English is still influential over most of the Commonwealth, ie a large number of countries.
Languagetool is an open source tool you can run as a local spelling and grammar checker. It's different to Grammarly - less AI and more rules based. I often use both tools at the same time. I wrote a quick intro on how to self host this - https://martincapodici.com/2025/05/10/check-your-writing-usi....
This is precisely what I've been hoping somebody would build. In my initial testing, it works well. I can even mix sentences with different languages, and it still makes correct suggestions.
The fluency suggestions are seemingly largely malfunctioning. It frequently suggests starting and ending sentences with quotes, although it also makes some useful suggestions. There seems to be an issue with analysis running synchronized, or something like that; when I type into a text field and Refine starts to run, it often blocks text entry. Selecting a suggested replacement blocks the app for half a second or so. Neither of these problems occurs with Grammarly or Language Tool. I also noticed a bunch of issues that Grammarly catches (like verb agreement) that Refine does not.
But this is an amazing first release and extremely promising. Congrats!
Does anyone know how this compares to other products in its field, such as LanguageTool and Harper? LanguageTool can be hosted locally, and Harper runs entirely as an extension, so I'm interested in how the spelling and grammar checks compare.
+1. Also worth noting that both LanguageTool [0] and Harper [1] are FOSS.
[0] https://languagetool.org/
[1] https://writewithharper.com/
We're building a Chrome extension grammar checker that runs locally using Chrome's built-in LLM.
You can try it out here:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grammit-the-ai-gram...
LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".
I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period.
Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.
Extra space after periods is never correct with proportionally-spaced fonts, which is why all browsers remove it by default.
Two spaces after periods is a kludge invented for typewriters that had monospaced fonts and touch typing teachers need to stop teaching it in the modern era where most writing uses proportional fonts.
Curiously, it‘s also a tell-tale sign that a North-American typed the text.
Just as a space before colons or exclamation marks is a sign that someone francophone typed it.
Indeed - especially the space before colons and semi-colons. The space before exclamation marks sometimes happens in informal typing amongst Brazilians. But never the space before colons/semi-colons.
browser rendering does. You'd need white-space: pre-wrap rule to retain double spaces.
You can use a local instance of LanguageTool in a docker container for this:
https://github.com/gardner/LocalLanguageTool
Gosh people love complicating things.
You don't need docker (a Linux-only piece of tech) to run a java application. Even though I'm on Linux, and docker experience is waaaaay better here than on any other platform, I wouldn't in my life consider using it to run LanguageTool.
A lot of people would rather pay $15 than mess with docker containers
How well does it handle standard international English? So many of the tools I've seen seem to only support American English.
Speaking of which, isn't it time to consider American English to be the standard one?
Colour and licence are so quaint.
Well, only Americans use it. There's no point in arguing about it your version of a language is better or worse but for the rest of the world it's incredibly annoying having to correct Zs with Ss when using LLMs or American only software.
I'm actually Russian. The whole world uses American English, by virtue of US dominance in all important technical and cultural spheres.
"The only whole world uses American English" ... I think you might be living in a bubble. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
He is actually correct. I am neither American nor English.
Commonwealth nations tend to not use American English. They form a fairly major part of the world.
I honestly don't think this is true. In many places outside the US our devices will default to US spelling, making it appear as if the language spoken by the locals is US English.
But when you look at things like the type of English being taught in school, or the language used by the government, it'll be UK/International English.
I regularly correspond to people from all over the world, India, China, Brazil, France, and they all tend to use US English, thus the suggestion.
Commonwealth countries are relatively minor in population compared to the USA and the rest of the world.
And yes, default US spelling in devices does play a role. See prev. point about technological and cultural dominance.
I think we need to call American English "American", then you can speak American and I can speak English.
I could care less about this attempt at trolling, but I won't.
We have enough American cultural hegemony as it is. It frustrates me no end that I regularly am unable[1] to configure software to use my preferred version of English.
[1] or it's extremely difficult. CLion I'm looking at you; every available option I have is set to British English, but still you insist on telling me my Colours should be corrected to Color etc. :(
English is a bastard language of French and Saxon. But we don’t get upset over that because Britain made the world English. Now the USA is making the world American. That ship has sailed.
I'm really wondering if/why Grammarly still has a business case, in this age of LLMs.
Very cool product. And thank you for not making it a subscription.
> Can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Feel free to sent us an email at support@refine.sh
Should be "send". Especially with this kind of product, you shouldn't have grammar mistakes on the website :)
> Powered by local AI models
I worry that this will make my writing more likely to fail an AI coursework detector, which could really impact my life. The risk just isn't worth it till someone has tested the output through all the big players (turnitin etc.)
If I use correct punctuation marks my work will be more likely to be \detected\ as AI written; The risk just isn"t worth it so I never do that^
It's hilarious, on some other sites one is immediately accused of using ChatGPT when using the n-dash (–) or m-dash (—) instead of the hyphen (-). Not an issue with the monospaced font here. ETA: I stand corrected.
ChatGPT tends to speak in american english, which means it's obvious to readers in the rest of the world because local phrases aren't used.
Seams weird to not have "How does this compare to Apple Intelligence Writing Tools" at least in the FAQ. Maybe refine is better or has more features, but the page doesn't even seem to acknowledge that a system level feature like this exists.
Worth to mention as another alternative: Harper[0]
[0]: https://writewithharper.com/
Harper is so basic that I can't recommend it.
Does not catch a singular/plural discrepancy between the subject and the verb in a sentence--a common mistake when the expressed thought applies equally to one thing or to many things.
Does not catch a missed indefinite article--a common mistake for speakers of languages that don't have articles. Similarly, does not catch the use of the indefinite article for a thing already mentioned before.
Does not even catch the obvious "don;t" typo.
Neat idea. I see why the fluency feature is off by default. It constantly rewords things, adds random quotations, or does something pretty silly https://imgur.com/oVSWmtN
The Grammar feature seems to have weird suggestions/cycles too on a little bit more testing. Curious to see how this improves. A local only, one-time-purchase grammarly alternative is appealing!
My biggest problem with Grammarly is how buggy it is. How often it doesn’t work as intended and either messes up formatting or doesn’t change the text when I click.
Does Refine solve this?
It does this
because what's under the hood is this, and prompts are hardcodedunsloth/gemma-3n-E4B-it-GGUF
If this were open source AGPL it'd be an insta-download.
Wonderful! I've given it a go, works in Apple's Notes app, but it does not seem to trigger suggestions in Chrome, Firefox or Slack. It does however highlight misspellings there. Any idea what can I do to enable suggestions there? I was looking for a product like this.
Same! Interested in this but need it to work for Slack, where I often type more informally and don't take the time I should to proofread.
why is there no open source alternatives to this? Seems ripe to be just built.
Couldnt make it to show suggestions in vscode/cursor. I would like to use the tool, but i'd expect it to work consistently across all widgets in the system (i.e. like superwhisper). Is there a technical limitation here or my misconfiguration of things?
I would pay 50$ a year if this had a vim integration.
It'd be neat if there was an open source solution this polished.
I've installed it to give it a try but it does absolutely nothing in any application I use. I did give it required permissions.
Holy crap, a local-only app with one-time purchase *and* a free demo? You don't see that very often these days
What I'd be interested in would be something I could host on my local server (e.g. with ollama) to get suggestions on my laptop, where I write typst or markdown with Zed or VSCode.
I realize I'm a niche :)
Does anybody know of such a tool?
I'm missing some information on how this works (a LLM? which? Do I need to bring an API key? Does this work offline?) and what I can expect in terms of performance/battery hit.
> Lightning Fast. Local processing means instant results without internet dependency or delays. > Always Available. Works offline, on flights, in coffee shops, anywhere you write.
Two of your 4 questions were answered in the first content block
It is Gemma 3n, I can't give feedback yet on the battery hit, But I would not expect anything bad as these models have been developed for much smaller devices (Phones)
Considering that it mentions offline capability I'd say local tiny LLM.
If you are running local LLMs what is the hardware requirement in my machine? Don't see any mention of that.
Gemma 3n (the model used by this app) would run on any Apple Silicon device (even with 8GB RAM).
How big is the model that powers this?
8B (Gemma 3n)
https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/gemma-3n
Isn't privacy a concern? How do consumers ensure that data is not going to captured in a future update without it being open source or having third party security audits?
That's a concern with all apps ever so idk what answer you're expecting
Except the open-source ones, or sandboxed[1] ones without any auto-update functionality (not sure if this app has any).
[1] Loosely; I’d say not referencing any networking entrypoints or dlsym() also counts, as working around that would be very non-deniably malicious.
Does this only supports English?
Theoretically, it could support over 140 languages, as it is powered by the newly released Gemma 3n model. However, I haven’t tested many languages yet.
In upcoming releases, Refine will support custom prompts and BYOK (Bring Your Own Key), allowing you to use any large language model you want.
What's the rationale behind adding BYOK? Or the advantages?
You do realise you're already using an optimised model built for everyday devices, and that model includes some serious innovations in parameter-efficient processing, right?
You're a great developer, and it looks like you're thinking about adding features like BYOK quickly to please more users. But in doing that, you might be missing the real innovation you've already created. You've basically built a version of Grammarly without the privacy issues that make most IT departments ban it.
No one wants Grammarly or your tool sending corporate emails or documents to a language model. Privacy is what sets you apart from Grammarly. It's your biggest feature right now. Add a big table to your site comparing your products privacy with Grammarly's. That's your strongest selling point, and probably the only feature that can truly compete with the big players.
My advice? Keep improving the app, but keep the model local. Keep it private. That's the killer feature you've got.
One can have a beefier server at home and may want to use it for running the model while out and about with their laptop.
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