That’s nothing, of course, in comparison to Word’s market penetration - even in 2016, Microsoft claimed there were 1.2 billion MS Office users.

In 2019, the company received US$90m in funding, which is a pretty big number for an NLP company and Grammarly now claims 30 million daily users. Today, Grammarly is the clear market leader in tools whose primary function is writing assistance. We singled out Grammarly, founded in 2009, for particular attention, not least because of the significant visibility it had achieved through its somewhat relentless online marketing program.

Then, five years ago, we surveyed how a number of new entrants had nonetheless managed to gain a foothold in the writing assistance marketplace ( Dale 2016). By bundling what was then a state-of-the-art approach to grammar checking with the market-leading desktop office software, effectively for free, it seemed that Microsoft had set the barrier to entry for third parties insurmountably high. Way back in Dale (2004), we suggested that Microsoft’s incorporation of grammar checking into MS Word, its near-ubiquitous word processing platform, was stifling innovation in the space. This column has looked at commercially available tools for writing assistance - more specifically, grammar checkers and related technologies - twice before. We review some history, look at where things stand today and consider where things might be going.Ī version of this article appears in the Journal of Natural Language Engineering. But the category has been given a substantial boost from recent advances in deep learning. Automated writing assistance - a category that encompasses a variety of computer-based tools that help with writing - has been around in one form or another for 60 years, although it’s always been a relatively minor part of the NLP landscape.

Apps like wordrake