DeepL Write: The Next Big Thing in Writing Assistance to Tackle Grammarly

Last week, one of our favourite German companies and probably the best online translator in the world right now – DeepL Pro – raised according to Businessinsider a big round of funding that valued the company at $1 billion.

On January the 17th 2023, DeepL released their new language paraphrasing tool, which is the first expansion for a startup that became known for its popular AI-based translation tools.

DeepL Write it is called.

DeepL Write is a new tool that fixes your writing by finding grammar and punctuation mistakes, providing suggestions for better clarity and more creative wording, can paraphrase content and (soon) giving you the option to change your tone.

DeepL Write is based on the same neural network that powers DeepL’s translator. This is an important step forward in how artificial intelligence technologies, especially those in natural language processing, are being used to change how people talk to each other, which is thanks to OpenAI and ChatGPT a big topic right now.

You may already know a little bit about how DeepL Write works. That’s because DeepL’s new service is competing with some very popular products already on the market: Grammarly and Quillbot which are used by more than 30 million (!) daily active users and about 50,000 businesses and teams.

Even if you don’t use Grammarly or Quillbot (or LanguageTool), you probably heard about them. Grammarly’s valuation went from $1 billion to a $13 billion two years ago, even though many venture capitalists warned about the risks of focusing on features instead of platforms.

DeepL’s motto is to welcome competition and use it to push themselves to do better work. Microsoft and Google, two of the biggest tech companies in the world, both offer real-time translators (Bing Microsoft Translator and Google Translate). DeepL Translator was the company’s main product, and until today, it was the only one. (And that’s not even considering the many other options for real-time translation.)

The company’s CEO, Jarek Kutylowski, said lately in an interview, “We are always in race mode.” “We’re used to facing big problems, and it’s part of our culture to keep going even when things get hard.” In fact, many people think that DeepL’s neural network-based translator works better than these others because it picks up on subtleties and meanings that its competitors miss. The author has sworn translators in his family, and even they do prefer DeepL (if at all, of course).

The goal of releasing DeepL Write in English and German at first as a monolingual tool (you enter English writing and get English results) is to first observe how Write is used across these two languages. DeepL Write is available without sign-up requirements and features simple translation tools (as you do with Grammarly to use its free tools).

Rather than rewriting everything that is submitted into Write, the current focus for the tool is on addressing style, tone, phrasing, and diction. I think it’s only a matter of time before these functionalities are added.

My first experience with DeepL Write showed that there is still room for improvement, especially when it comes to User friendliness. What I missed is for example a button which copies the modified text directly into the translation model so that a user do not have to copy and paste it manually, which is currently somewhat awkward.

Taken an excerpt from an English Wikipedia Article, it showed indeed the potential of paraphrasing text.

Something that Quillbot, in particular, but also Grammarly, previously provided for its Pro users and became lately quite popular with text generated by ChatGPT.

It is unclear how DeepL will price its tool in the future; it is likely that they will undercut the prices of its two main competitors. By the way – it you want to know how to integrate ChatGPT into WordPress, you may want to check out our tutorial ChatGPT Chatbot for WordPress. Interesting times.