Discover more from Start-Up PR 102 by Marek Unt
4 AI-powered writing tools I use daily
Over the last six months, I have used AI to help me edit my writing, generate new ideas and angles, and refine messaging.
Edit: I posted this a couple of weeks before ChatGPT’s public launch, so the AI revolution was yet to come…
These are the tools I use almost every day.
Copy.ai – a writing multi-tool for marketers and copywriters.
It can help you whip up a full-blown blog post in a couple of steps with just a little input from you.
(A screenshot of the blog post generator.)
There is also a "freestyle" mode where you can simply tell it what you need, say a headline for an e-mail, a blog post outline, or a press release title, and it will put out suggestions within those parameters. This one’s my favourite.
Copy.ai is very productive but not always spot-on. Exercising your own judgment is highly recommended.
Wordtune – like a thesaurus for sentences or phrases.
You highlight the section you're not completely happy with, and it will spit out up to 10 alternate versions.
You can ask it to make a sentence shorter (always do that), longer (rarely do that), or more formal/informal.
(A screenshot of the Wordtune pop-up in Google Docs.)
It's the next best thing to an actual editor reviewing your copy. I use it all the time, including for tidying up this post.
Lex – like Google Docs with AI built in.
Besides having a clean writing experience, their selling point is being able to type +++ in the editor and have AI magically pick up your writing for you, producing a paragraph or two that build on the previous story.
This is great if you get stuck or wish to riff on some ideas.
(The section in blue is written by Lex. It does a nice job promoting itself.)
Lex shares similarities with Copy.ai's freestyle mode: you can also tell it to do something specific like "Generate a list of best AI writing tools", type in +++ and it will do just that.
Grammarly - an honourable mention for the OG in this category.
You’ve surely heard of this one. With all the new tools available, I use it less and less.
It still sits in my browser like an overqualified spellchecker, occasionally suggesting to remove a comma or split a sentence in half.
But AI has come a long way and these days you can use it for so much more than just grammar.
(Not a bad suggestion by Grammarly; I could easily make the sentence shorter and not lose much.)
I'm looking forward to Notion AI, which is – you guessed it – an AI-writer built into Notion. It's still in alpha, but from the demos I've seen, it's basically capable of doing all the things the above tools do.
Notion has never been my favourite environment for writing, but this might make it a better choice.
A huge disclaimer
While these tools are impressive and can spit out completely usable content, you will still end up with complete gibberish if you trust the tool blindly.
Your decisions still make up your writing, and the tools are just there to help you work faster and more efficiently.
So no, AI is not going to do your job for you, just yet.
What’s the price?
Most of the tools aren't free. Here are the starting prices:
Copy.ai – $49 / month (but there’s a free tier with a limited amount of words generated)
Wordtune – $24.99 / month (or $9.99 if billed annually)
Lex – for now, this one’s free
Grammarly – $12 / month if billed annually
What are some great writing tools I should know about? Let me know.
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If you’re looking for help with positioning, messaging or helping you figure out the day-to-day of start-up or scale-up PR, let me know at marek.unt@gmail.com. I’m booked up for the next couple of months but we could get the ball rolling.
ChatGPT, but I'm sure you know about this already.