Grammarly is one of the tools I pay for, and I am worried about the security risks of using it.
Really wish there was an alternative that:
1) Does local processing (local LLM?) instead of sending all my data to their server.
2) Had a lightweight Chrome extension that didn't inject many MBs of scripts on
each page.
How does Harper compare with LanguageTool. We use a privately hosted version. It's better than nothing, but in practice it's more like a super-charged spell checker.
On the homepage it has a comparison of figures, presumably indicating response time, though it doesn't speak to its performance in terms of grammatical errors caught:
Harper - 10 ms
LanguageTool - 650 ms
Grammarly - 4000 ms
Feels like that'd be trivial to build, biggest issue is having to ship large files (LLM weights), but maybe CNNs would be enough, I'm guessing Grammarly started with CNNs or similar?
What are you using Grammarly for, is it just spell/grammar checking or something more? Is the UX particularly good? Personally I tried it some years ago but didn't understand/see what is/was special about it.
I personally used to have a subscription for grammar checking, especially for longer papers. Now, I just use a LLM. I personally don’t see the strategic value of them pivoting to using genAI; there is no way I would pay $30 a month for something that will take at most 100k tokens using other LLMs. They seemed to have heavily downplayed their unique aspect which is the deterministic ruleset.
For a more-classic, more-human experience (i.e., computer flags potential issues, you decide and correct if necessary) there are proselint and vale.sh.
