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'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?
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?
> 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].
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.
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."
There is a great comment I read about a decade ago from anthony_franco [0] about exactly this issue with many "open source alternatives to X", this one specifically about an alternative to Product Hunt that then failed:
> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.
> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.
> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.
The elephant in the room here is how you ethically get people to onboard without an existing community / fomo / money.
The trick is getting the content creators there, but most of them are ultimately and fairly interested in making money, and your new platform wont have that for them.
Bluesky has done alright, but that was a black swan event Elon Musk inspired.
Describing American English as “simplified” English is textbook bad linguistics. It’s a different dialect, not an inherently simpler or more complex one.
In the UK, it's considered good form to be humorous when making an argument; I gather that in the US, you're supposed to sound like you're making a speech to prepare troops for war. I apologise if, in the course of describing how a product is unsuitable for use in my culture, I made that argument according to the norms of my culture.
I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.
For what it’s worth, I’m a native British English speaker and don’t instinctively consider “practice” “grammatically incorrect”. Indeed, I would probably write “practice” myself.
Pretty sure I had this corrected on more than one occasion when I was at school.
Also licence/license.
I remember one day figuring out the parallel with advice/advise as a way to remember which was which. So C for the noun and S for the verb.
Weirdly (to my brain), Americans always spell practice with a C, but always spell license with an S.
Fluent American readers are likely to think "practise" is a typo. It's not even one of the commonly-known British/American spelling differences (like "color"/"colour"). Unless you know your audience is likely to be more familiar with British spelling, I'd avoid "practise."
They're not very smart then: most non-native people know there are several big mainstream ways to spell English, and we learn that on top of our own languages.
Couldn't American schools teach English the same way, like, that there are no single proper way ?
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.
> So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English?
Correct: practice is a noun, and practise is a verb, in non-US English. I don't have my (twenty-volume) copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but Wiktionary has an explanation under 'usage notes': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/practise
Calling American spelling "simplified" is anachronistic. It'd be more accurate to call British English "embellished". UK English was irreparably damaged by some smug wannabe-Frenchmen who decided there weren't enough unpronounced letters in English after we broke off.
In American English, "practise" is incorrect. So if the screenshot is taken from a user using the en_US locale it is correct. Perhaps, if your locale is en_GB it will correct "practice" to "practise", but you can't know that from a screenshot.
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.
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've run LanguageTool Server with the ngrams[0] for years, it is legitimately excellent with the ngrams (and mediocre without). The English-only ngrams are roughly 15 GB on disk.
Just have a Windows Scheduled Task kick off this bat file:
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.
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}}"
Imagine if WinRAR didn't let you archive or name your files what you want. How we were trusted with such DESTRUCTIVE tools all these years is beyond me. /s
There is no guarantee that this software will not occasionally start acting as a keylogger. If somehow this happens (let's assume not intentionally), 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.
Apple provides a network client entitlement[1] that sandboxed apps must have, to connect to the network. Since this app isn't sandboxed, that restriction doesn't apply.
Personally, I only use software that was either built on my machine or downloaded off of the Mac App Store (MAS apps have the be mandatory sandboxed).
Well, I understand the security benefits of sandboxing. However, Apple's sandbox restrictions prevent apps from using Accessibility APIs, which are essential for Refine to read and enhance text across different applications.
Many popular apps, like Grammarly and Raycast, are also not sandboxed for the same reason. Without these APIs, Refine wouldn’t be able to provide a seamless text refinement experience. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we just use ChatGPT to correct the grammar?
Not at all. Most commercial software has a publisher (as legal entity) that is responsible for privacy and takes reputational risks if something goes wrong.
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!
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....
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.)
We'll soon need a writing tool that introduces spelling and grammar errors into our text and messes with punctuation so that we aren't accused of using LLMs.
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.
I don't think the risks are high with this. It's not writing for you. It's just correcting your grammar. If you're 99% writing it yourself and just having it highlight grammar mistakes I wouldn't expect it to trigger an alarm....... but I haven't been in school since waaay before LLMs were viable/common. So, maybe it's worse than I think.
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 command without context is not very useful. If anyone wants to run LanguageTool locally, I suggest reading the official documentation page: https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server
Their recommended process is :
1. Install fasttext (it's an official Debian package, but you have to compile it on Windows).
2. Download and uncompress the LanguageTool release.
3. Create a config file.
4. Launch the server with the java command (of course, a JRE must be installed).
5. Connect to the API, e.g. with the browser extension.
Running a ready-made docker image replaces steps 1-4 and removes the need to install Java globally. Some will prefer it this way.
It is restricted by Flatpak (i.e. Control Groups and Namespaces):
* No file-system access
* No access to devices
* Network Access is allowed (API of Languagetool is only reachable via REST?)
It is fat. But that's more an issue of Java itself. I only wish Languagetool didn't use Java, which is fine on a servers but horrible on personal-computers. Implemented in C, C++ or Rust and it would be probably already part of LibreOffice. Sonny Piers is the packager Flatpak, a prominent ex-member of GNOME board. He was removed due some Code-Of-Conduct thing which nobody can explain, due to issues within the Code-Of-Conduct.
PS: LibreOffice had to fight years to remove Java which plagued the project.
Readit News
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
That is simply not true. Maybe that's how you feel about it, but it is generally not the case (or even considered, really).
> ... 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.
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
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."
> OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is king, that's what consumers want.
> There have been many examples of people rallying around a "free and open" version of a service. They fail to realize that the end consumer barely cares. Look at voat (Reddit), app.net (Twitter), Diaspora (Facebook), even ycreject.com (Y Combinator) tried to be a thing for a while.
> If someone is able to make it "free and open" while also making it a better experience than the alternative, then it'll be a big success. But so far everyone gets that wrong.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10934465#10940729
The trick is getting the content creators there, but most of them are ultimately and fairly interested in making money, and your new platform wont have that for them.
Bluesky has done alright, but that was a black swan event Elon Musk inspired.
In the UK, it's considered good form to be humorous when making an argument; I gather that in the US, you're supposed to sound like you're making a speech to prepare troops for war. I apologise if, in the course of describing how a product is unsuitable for use in my culture, I made that argument according to the norms of my culture.
I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
Deleted Comment
Weirdly (to my brain), Americans always spell practice with a C, but always spell license with an S.
Couldn't American schools teach English the same way, like, that there are no single proper way ?
Correct: practice is a noun, and practise is a verb, in non-US English. I don't have my (twenty-volume) copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but Wiktionary has an explanation under 'usage notes': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/practise
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.
British English is still influential over most of the Commonwealth, ie a large number of countries.
[0] https://languagetool.org/
[1] https://writewithharper.com/
Just have a Windows Scheduled Task kick off this bat file:
[0] https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.
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.
Deleted Comment
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".
And they can also cause new factual mistakes that a grammar checker never would!
unsloth/gemma-3n-E4B-it-GGUF
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
Personally, I only use software that was either built on my machine or downloaded off of the Mac App Store (MAS apps have the be mandatory sandboxed).
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/en...
Many popular apps, like Grammarly and Raycast, are also not sandboxed for the same reason. Without these APIs, Refine wouldn’t be able to provide a seamless text refinement experience. Otherwise, why wouldn’t we just use ChatGPT to correct the grammar?
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!
They don't advertise this because they are trying to push their paid online services. I have complained about this, but they didn't seem to care.
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.)
https://github.com/gardner/LocalLanguageTool
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.
Their recommended process is :
1. Install fasttext (it's an official Debian package, but you have to compile it on Windows).
2. Download and uncompress the LanguageTool release.
3. Create a config file.
4. Launch the server with the java command (of course, a JRE must be installed).
5. Connect to the API, e.g. with the browser extension.
Running a ready-made docker image replaces steps 1-4 and removes the need to install Java globally. Some will prefer it this way.
You don't need to fight with installing (the correct version of) java. I wouldn't in my life consider installing java on my OS directly.
For anyone with docker already installed (most people these days)...
https://github.com/sonnyp/Eloquent
It is restricted by Flatpak (i.e. Control Groups and Namespaces):
It is fat. But that's more an issue of Java itself. I only wish Languagetool didn't use Java, which is fine on a servers but horrible on personal-computers. Implemented in C, C++ or Rust and it would be probably already part of LibreOffice. Sonny Piers is the packager Flatpak, a prominent ex-member of GNOME board. He was removed due some Code-Of-Conduct thing which nobody can explain, due to issues within the Code-Of-Conduct.PS: LibreOffice had to fight years to remove Java which plagued the project.