ai writing assistant

ai writing assistant

The Benefits of an AI Writing Assistant

1. Introduction

It is important to note the difference between “augmented writing” and the type of “machine-assisted writing” that has existed in word processing tools for the last two or three decades. An AI writing assistant can reason about the content being composed, providing language translations and coherent summarizations. An early form of AI-assisted writing provided suggestions such as grammar and spell checking, word recommendation, and synonym replacement. While powerful, these functions were based on rule system reasoning that relied on deterministic patterns. While simple word patterns may have covered a large proportion of the corrective suggestions that were needed, the possibility of reformulating sentences into alternative structures to maximize impact and information retention for their reader remained untapped. For example, generic grammar checking often only achieves partial success when proofreading longer narratives. User sentiment might be misclassified, or missing proper nouns, trafficked locations, industry jargon, emoji or slang might trigger suggested changes that result in unintended meaning shifts or confusion. More generally, with some authors enjoying supportive use case – carelessness might grow as “Undo” becomes a writer’s dependable parachute.

Today’s knowledge workers face constant growth in the volume and complexity of information they have to process to accomplish their professional goals. In response to this growth, the technology industry has been working to create new tools that rely on machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) to help people accomplish tasks ranging from parsing canned responses to typically asked questions, to generating expert-level prose that is published under the byline of a human author. Within this universe of new ML and NLP-driven productivity tools exists a category of tools that can be used to improve the writing process itself, whether it’s the authoring of an academic paper, a tweet, or a marketing email. What is the potential that this technology has as a writing productivity aid, when put in the hands of a knowledge worker? Today, most state-of-the-art AI models that exemplify this type of technology are not widely deployed, and much of the anticipated time savings are only realized when high-quality, custom models are fine-tuned for a specific workflow. In this paper, we present a deployment-ready AI writing productivity aid that is built on top of the most advanced, state-of-the-art (SOTA) NLP models, and we consider a user group (audience) that continues to benefit from the technology, even when they’re restricted to use a more general purpose, off-the-shelf model.

2. Improved Writing Efficiency

Because writing assistants inspire confidence, writers are more likely to adopt an occasional goal pursuit to the prescribed writing goal left unspecified (i.e., simply addressing an audience) or a makeshift writing goal that in some form resembles the specified writing task. To make these findings productive, it has been suggested that AI writing assistants can enhance aged adults’ personal, social, and literacy skills by (1) giving users 24/7 support, (2) motivating users to write more frequently and meaningfully, (3) facilitating the generation and evaluation of ideas, and (4) providing immediate and specific feedback on what was done well and what needs improvement. Moreover, writing assistants make writing less taxing and increase writers’ willingness to practice writing.

Writing has often been associated with deadlines, which often turn into “last-minute writing.” While being under time constraints can help with productivity or performance, it is not always the case. For example, under such circumstances, writers are likely to be more defensive, to generate fewer ideas, and to identify fewer and more superficial aspects compared to non-defensive writers. AI writing assistants can contribute to combating these negative effects by (1) piercing through defensiveness, by providing a virtually blame-free environment for writing, reviewing, and editing, as well as helping with prewriting and revision; (2) generating more ideas and identifying more central and thorough writing components; (3) encouraging a growth mindset by providing challenging writing suggestions and positive reinforcement.

3. Enhanced Writing Quality

Modern software development is strongly influenced by the paradigm of continuous delivery, which demands frequent product releases. For example, replacement of outdated dependencies, bug fixing, and performance tuning should be done as early as possible, the changes to the project repository shall be pushed daily. Even writing documentation and creating design studies without writing a line of code is often seen as a waste of time in this context, but is necessary to close a project according to industry standards. This situation requires tools, systems, or assistants within the IDE to write better and faster. An AI writing assistant can help to handle these interdisciplinary tasks within the budget.

The AI writing assistant, for example, can find writing problems in the text, Compound word bugs deal with spelling errors in English compounds in which one of the words is spelled incorrectly. It fulfills the characteristics of a good writing assistant, hence, it can support developers in writing papers, preparing presentations and reports, and working on projects with customers. In conclusion, it improves modern software development in today’s paradigm of continuous delivery, where developers are responsible for writing code, tests, and documentation in a given time budget.

4. Personalized Writing Suggestions

An additional way of personalizing feedback to the user is through learning the users’ text editing behavior when corrected and not corrected by the system. As discussed, a common form of a proofreading tool for non-standard language (e.g. text message, email) with a large user base can learn to correct grammar, style, and other errors by analyzing statistical patterns. But by analyzing the ways users improve or overwrite (and then revert) revisions, editors can be learned word-level context-based transformation rules. This is particularly useful for proxy metrics of user impact: the most used word transformation suggestions are also generally the most common grammar, style, or diction errors. Therefore, by offering the most common word transformation suggestions (and making the most popular ones simple “one press” transformations), not only do we increase the accuracy and speed of proofreading, but this also serves as subtle instruction in writing style.

The most valuable type of feedback is that which is personalized to the individual, and a study performed in 2012 showed that creativity is boosted through personalized feedback. Studies have now shown that personalized feedback is especially effective in creative writing: by far the most effective way to boost creative writing scores in students, especially when such baseline scores are low, is to provide direct individualized feedback on drafts. Hence, even in this earliest experimental phase, automated personalization as in an AI writing assistant is shown to have a strong potential to augment the creative process of writing.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we’ve tried to better understand the concept of Artificial Intelligence Writing Assistant and why it is beneficial for content writers. Using the right AI tools, content writers can cut the time they spend writing and publishing by half or more, freeing them up to learn new skills, write longer pieces, or explore new story ideas. For publishers, smartful.ai has already helped to quickly grow their subscriber base with consistently high-quality articles written by professional content writers. Also, SmartfulAI writing assistants can help content writers write more clearly, deploy more diverse voices, and create reports more efficiently. Because smartful.ai writing assistants are learning from all the data available, we’re particularly well-suited to help publishers, content marketers, and even brands who have taken the time to think about diversity and inclusion write work that’s fairer, more unbiased, and more inclusive. With smartful.ai writing assistants, we aim to put the “wordsmiths” strategies into play, many of which are already being used by more and more publishers and content writers in the space. We see great promise not only in making their textual content marketing material more efficient, but in spreading their style and ensuring sustainable innovation for diverse perspective across the growing readers base.