4 ms·

Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local process

Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it. Really wish there was an alternative that: 1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server. 2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on each page.

diggan 1y ago
Feels like that'd be trivial to build, biggest issue is having to ship large files (LLM weights), but maybe CNNs would be enough, I'm guessing Grammarly started with CNNs or similar? What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.
- NewsaHackO 1y ago
  I personally used to have a subscription for grammar checking, especially for longer papers. Now, I just use a LLM. I personally don’t see the strategic value of them pivoting to using genAI; there is no way I would pay $30 a month for something that will take at most 100k tokens using other LLMs. They seemed to have heavily downplayed their unique aspect which is the deterministic ruleset.
nwjsmith 1y ago
Harper checks a lot of your boxes and is getting better all the time: https://writewithharper.com/ https://writewithharper.com/
- jgalt212 1y ago
  How does Harper compare with LanguageTool. We use a privately hosted version. It's better than nothing, but in practice it's more like a super-charged spell checker.
  - hiatus 1y ago
    On the homepage it has a comparison of figures, presumably indicating response time, though it doesn't speak to its performance in terms of grammatical errors caught: Harper - 10 ms LanguageTool - 650 ms Grammarly - 4000 ms
treetalker 1y ago
For a more-classic, more-human experience (i.e., computer flags potential issues, you decide and correct if necessary) there are proselint and vale.sh. https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://vale.sh/ https://vale.sh/
jakub_g 1y ago
FWIW: latest Chrome ships built-in AI APIs https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api so it should be a matter of time to have a replacement extension using this local API. However the built-in model is Gemini Nano.
- swyx 1y ago
  yeah i highly doubt people will use Nano for more than simple retitling because we're so used to higher intelligence for ~free elsewhere

diggan 1y ago

Feels like that'd be trivial to build, biggest issue is having to ship large files (LLM weights), but maybe CNNs would be enough, I'm guessing Grammarly started with CNNs or similar? What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.

NewsaHackO 1y ago
I personally used to have a subscription for grammar checking, especially for longer papers. Now, I just use a LLM. I personally don’t see the strategic value of them pivoting to using genAI; there is no way I would pay $30 a month for something that will take at most 100k tokens using other LLMs. They seemed to have heavily downplayed their unique aspect which is the deterministic ruleset.

nwjsmith 1y ago

Harper checks a lot of your boxes and is getting better all the time: https://writewithharper.com/ https://writewithharper.com/

jgalt212 1y ago
How does Harper compare with LanguageTool. We use a privately hosted version. It's better than nothing, but in practice it's more like a super-charged spell checker.
- hiatus 1y ago
  On the homepage it has a comparison of figures, presumably indicating response time, though it doesn't speak to its performance in terms of grammatical errors caught: Harper - 10 ms LanguageTool - 650 ms Grammarly - 4000 ms

treetalker 1y ago

For a more-classic, more-human experience (i.e., computer flags potential issues, you decide and correct if necessary) there are proselint and vale.sh. https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://github.com/amperser/proselint https://vale.sh/ https://vale.sh/

jakub_g 1y ago

FWIW: latest Chrome ships built-in AI APIs https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/prompt-api so it should be a matter of time to have a replacement extension using this local API. However the built-in model is Gemini Nano.

swyx 1y ago
yeah i highly doubt people will use Nano for more than simple retitling because we're so used to higher intelligence for ~free elsewhere