Imagine this—perhaps you’re coming down with a cold and you need to email your boss to let them know you can’t make it to work the next day. But, you want to sound formal and respectful. Wordtune can help make that happen. Or, if you’re someone like me, who finds what they write a little rough around the edges sometimes, Wordtune can help clean that up, too. “While your brain is busy penning down thoughts randomly, Wordtune can help organize and polish the crude thoughts into refined paragraphs and appropriately convey your meaning. It lessens the gap between your brain and your book,” Mrudul Shah, an AI expert and chief technology officer at Technostacks, told Lifewire in an email.

Cleaning Up Nicely

Wordtune is a fairly new tool created by AI21 Labs to help you write better. While other tools like Grammarly focus on eliminating any obvious errors, Wordtune can simply rewrite long sentences or short paragraphs to help make your writing more concise, or even fit another tone altogether.  I’ve been using Wordtune for two weeks now, and I can honestly say it has changed my approach to writing. Instead of spending several minutes worrying about the quality of what I wrote, I now write the first few lines and let Wordtune suggest a few other ways to phrase it. Although it isn’t perfect, it can supplement your basic writing skills, and is a nice safety net to help catch any glaring inconsistencies. While you can rely on the basic tuning option to recommend additional ways to write something, Wordtune also includes a premium tier with features like casual and formal tones, as well as tools to shorten and extend lines of text. Those extra features come at a pretty steep cost, though, with the available plans starting at $119.88 a year, or $24.99 a month. If you’re looking to pick up Wordtune for a team of individuals, you can contact the company for more information on those plans, too. I spent around a week working with the free version, letting it suggest changes and restructures. Once I signed up for the premium version, though, I didn’t find much use for the tone-change options. They’re nice to have, but overall—at least in my experience—the regular rewrite option was my go-to feature. It just works, and it works well. The length controllers were a nice touch on the premium side, though. I found myself often turning to the sentence-shortening tool, as I have a tendency to get a little long-winded. Wordtune has helped me combat that a bit, but it’s also something you improve upon as you write more and more.

The Future of AI Writing

Wordtune isn’t the first AI writing tool to pop up, though. In fact, it isn’t even the most powerful. While Wordtune can help enhance your writing, it still requires that basic level of skill and output from the writer. Other systems, like Copy.ai, can completely generate content for companies, something we’re already seeing across multiple publications and websites. “AI writing has already been in use and in front of the eyes of millions of people every day for years,” Viputheshwar Sitaraman, an AI expert and digital consultant, explained in an email.  “From WaPo’s robot writer Heliograph to AP’s Automated Insights, thousands of stories published today are already produced by natural language processing (NLP) and generation (NLG),” Sitaraman added. “NLP is one of the core functionalities made possible by AI & machine learning (AI/ML); simply put, it entails AI-generated written content (from sentences to full articles).”  Wordtune isn’t quite as powerful as those other options out there, but it doesn’t need to be. It isn’t intended as a replacement for your basic writing skills. Instead, it’s an additional resource you can tap—as needed—to help you grab that extra bit of clarity in your writing.