Generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly ChatGPT, has taken an AI market that seemed far in the future and quickly catapulted it into our world. But the tools still feel crude, more suited to programmers than end users who want a more worker-friendly productivity tool.
That changed this week with the GrammarlyGo announcement. As a Grammarly user myself, I’m particularly excited about this addition and hope it gives us a frame of reference for when Microsoft finally adds generative AI to Office.
Generative AI could do a lot for those of us who type a lot and deal with an endless stream of email.
The GrammarlyGo Movement
GrammarlyGo is a prompt-based implementation of ChatGPT (although it might use other frameworks in the future). If you’re writing an article or column like this, it will ask you a series of questions, and from the resulting answers, you’ll write the article faster than you could possibly write it. The questions you ask are about tone and content and what specifics you want to include, and the result is something that looks like it was written by you.
You won’t get a good grasp of your personal style until you learn how you write, or until you write enough content that it becomes your way of writing. I hope that future versions can better tell the context and from your historical writing can better emulate exactly how you would write a piece.
Grammarly took me through a couple of demos; this is what i observed.
start an email
If you are spawning an email thread, it will ask you what you want done and any specific information you need to include before spawning the email. You can then make selections that change the tone of the email as needed and ensure that what you write is what you intended.
I immediately thought of my old friend Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, who used to write emails as if every word caused him pain. A two page email to him would often get a one or two sentence response, if he responded at all. This tool would have allowed Ballmer to do his limited response work, but still send a much more comprehensive email. Generative AI could see an email sent by someone else and come up with a recommended response, which would allow Ballmer (or anyone who hates writing emails) to appear much more empathetic and engaged without significantly increasing his workload.
(I have no doubt that it would have improved the way people corresponded with him.)
Additionally, the tool can create survey questions, bulleted lists, or other richer forms of email on demand.
Get rid of writer’s block
Most writers have days when we stare at a blank document and get stuck. If you can at least describe what you want to do, GrammarlyGo will try to help you get started and remove that writer’s block. You can even generate lists of topics to consider if you’re not sure what topic to cover. Personally, I find condolence letters difficult to write, and the thank-you notes I have to send usually end up not being written.
go grammaticallyGrammarlyGo can be used to rewrite content by length, among other things.
GrammarlyGo can do this automatically. In short, for much of the regular writing we do, it could serve as a useful tool, handling writing tasks we’d rather avoid, or at least creating a rough draft that we can use as a basis for our own work.
Depending on how bad your writer’s block is, this could shave days or even weeks off a particular project and allow you to meet deadlines.
AI is just beginning
This is still just the cutting edge of the generative AI journey. It will no doubt move from audio to video production. (The level of potential disruption on a variety of topics is through the roof.) Workers who think they might soon be using this type of tool need to aggressively train themselves, which is key to avoiding the need for mass layoffs once the technology matures. It’s also important to note that generative AI raises a number of legal and ethical questions about content creation and ownership that are far from resolved.
Before long, almost everything we interact with will have some form of generative AI behind it. This could result in a better work-life balance because AI tools can take over some of the most annoying and repetitive parts of our jobs, help us think through problems, and produce creative work that stands out both in quality as in quantity.
GrammarlyGo may be one of the first solutions of its kind, but it will be far from the last to make this leap.
Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.
