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Grammarly

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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 systemWindows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, various web browsers
Available in
TypeOnline text editor, browser extension, and mobile app with grammar checker, spell checker, and plagiarism detector
LicenseProprietary software
Websitegrammarly.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.

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

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. ^ a b 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. ^ a b c 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. ^ a b 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.
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