Writing quality content is hard. Whether you‘re working on articles, essays, reports, stories or any other written work, constructing clear and compelling prose takes real time and effort. Even the most talented writers can benefit from tools to help them hone their craft and communicate their ideas more effectively.
Enter artificial intelligence (AI) writing software. These cutting-edge tools are designed to analyze your writing and provide personalized suggestions and feedback to take it to the next level. Rather than replacing human writers, the goal of AI writing aids is to serve as a supportive assistant – an extra set of "eyes" to help polish your work into the best version of itself.
The market for these tools is booming. According to a report by Grand View Research, the global natural language processing (NLP) market size, which includes AI writing assistants, was valued at USD 20.98 billion in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.4% from 2022 to 2030. As AI capabilities continue to advance, these tools are becoming an increasingly integral part of the content creation process for writers of all kinds.
So what exactly can the top AI writing assistants do and how are they transforming the craft of content creation? Let‘s take a deep dive into the world of AI-powered writing software to find out.
Grammar, Spelling and Style Refinement at Your Fingertips
At their core, most AI writing aid tools focus on the fundamentals – helping you avoid embarrassing typos and grammatical errors. Using advanced natural language processing, they can quickly scan your text and flag potential issues like misspellings, punctuation mistakes, and incorrect word usage. Many can even explain the reasoning behind each suggestion to help improve your mastery of mechanics and syntax.
But the top writing AI tools go well beyond basic proofreading to provide in-depth analysis of your writing style and construction, identifying elements like:
- Overly complex language or jargon
- Excessive use of passive voice
- Run-on sentences or fragments
- Inconsistencies in tone or formatting
- Opportunities to trim clutter and improve clarity
For example, Grammarly, one of the most widely-used AI writing assistants, offers a "clarity-focused sentence rewrites" feature powered by machine learning. This tool automatically restructures verbose or convoluted sentences to enhance readability while still preserving your meaning and voice. By surfacing these opportunities and providing one-click optimization, Grammarly helps writers make their prose more punchy and purposeful with minimal manual effort.
ProWritingAid, another top AI platform, takes style analysis even further by generating 20+ customizable reports covering key facets of your writing – from sentence length and variability to vocabulary and readability scores. It even offers a "Consistency Check" that scans for inconsistencies in spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, and punctuation across the entirety of your document.
Features like these go beyond surface-level cleanup to help you dig deep into the DNA of your writing. By bringing patterns to light, they empower you to methodically refine your language and elevate your craft over time.
Unlocking Search Engine Success
For digital content crafted with online audiences in mind, search engine optimization (SEO) is critical. And many of today‘s most sophisticated AI writing tools now come equipped with features to help supercharge your search performance.
Using AI-powered analysis and massive datasets, they can evaluate your text in real-time and provide recommendations aligned with current SEO best practices, such as:
- Suggesting additional keywords and entities to naturally weave in based on your topic
- Identifying opportunities to add relevant links, both internal and external
- Ensuring your content structure, header tags, and meta elements are optimized
- Analyzing readability and providing tips to align complexity with target search intent
- Comparing your content comprehensiveness with top ranking articles for your focus keyword
For example, Clearscope is an AI-powered SEO content optimization tool that enables you to create search-optimized content in a fraction of the time. It uses natural language processing to analyze top-performing content related to your target keyword and generate an outline of essential topics and terms to cover. As you write, it provides a real-time content grade to show how well you‘re covering key concepts.
Frase, another leading AI content tool, offers an "SEO heatmap" feature that automatically compares your content to your SERP competitors and highlights important keywords you should incorporate to improve topical relevance. It also generates meta tag suggestions and automated FAQs based on real user search data to help you capture more long-tail traffic.
By integrating this kind of AI-driven SEO feedback directly into the writing process, these tools make it easy to create content that is both high-quality and highly optimized. Rather than retrofitting SEO after the fact, you can weave in best practices from the start to craft content that connects with readers and search engines alike.
The Heavy Hitters of AI Writing Enhancement
With so many AI-powered writing aid tools now on the market, the options can feel overwhelming. Here‘s a comparison of some of the most noteworthy players making waves:
| Tool | Key AI Features | Best For | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grammarly | Advanced grammar, spelling & style feedback Tone & clarity recommendations Plagiarism detection Human proofreading option |
Everyday writing Cleaning up spelling & grammar Improving word choice |
Free – $12.50/mo |
| Hemingway Editor | Readability analysis & optimization Passive voice & adverb detection Color-coded feedback interface |
Simplifying dense prose Improving flow & readability Developing more powerful writing |
$19.99 one-time |
| ProWritingAid | 20+ in-depth writing reports Contextual thesaurus Customizable style guides Integrations for MS Word, Scrivener, Chrome, etc. |
Comprehensive editing for long-form content Data-driven feedback on writing patterns Ensuring consistency across docs |
Free – $79/yr |
| Clearscope | AI-generated SEO content briefs & outlines Real-time content optimization scores Automated internal linking suggestions |
Planning & optimizing SEO content Improving topical comprehensiveness Competing with top-ranking content |
Custom pricing |
| Frase | AI research assistant to extract key insights Automated content briefs & outlines SEO optimization scores & heatmaps AI rewrite & paraphrasing tool |
Streamlining content research Identifying content gaps & opportunities Optimizing for search intent |
$14.99/mo – custom |
From Proofreader to Co-Author: The Expanding Roles of AI Writing Tech
As NLP models and machine learning continue to advance at a breakneck pace, AI is taking on an ever-expanding role in the writing process. Beyond just proofreading and optimization, the most advanced AI writing assistants are starting to blur the lines between editing tool and co-creation partner.
One of the most gamechanging developments is the rise of generative language models like GPT-3 that can create original, coherent text based on vast datasets of human writing. By fine-tuning these models on more specific knowledge domains and injecting them into user-friendly interfaces, a new breed of AI writing tools is emerging that can assist with tasks like:
- Generating complete article drafts on a topic based on minimal prompts
- Expanding on key points or ideas to flesh out arguments
- Ideating hooks, headlines, and intros to grab reader attention
- Summarizing long blocks of text into scannable snippets
- Translating jargon-heavy prose into layman‘s terms
- Adapting content into different voices, tones, and styles
For example, Copy.ai is a GPT-3-powered writing assistant that can generate original blog post drafts, social media content, ad copy, sales emails, and more with just a few inputs from the user. Rather than building a post from scratch, you can simply give it a few key details and watch it whip up a fully-formed first draft – often in under a minute.
Paradoxically, AI‘s ability to create increasingly human-like prose has only made the role of human oversight more crucial. Today‘s AI can write authentic-sounding content, but it still lacks real-world understanding and emotional intelligence. It can easily parrot biases, inaccuracies, and problematic views baked into its training data. As I discuss in my article "The Limitations & Dangers of AI-Generated Content – And What to Do About Them", content created by AI must be carefully fact-checked and filtered for quality and safety.
The most impactful AI writing tools are the ones that empower and enhance human writers rather than trying to replace them. When used as a complement to human creativity and judgment, they can help make the writing process more streamlined, data-driven, and scalable.
The Future of AI-Assisted Writing
As we‘ve seen, today‘s AI writing software offers a formidable array of tools to help content creators at every level sharpen their skills and boost their search visibility. But we‘re still only scratching the surface of what these technologies may be able to achieve.
According to a 2022 trends report by Grammarly, over the next five years, advancements in deep learning will enable writing AIs to deliver benefits like:
- Predictive text generation that learns your unique voice
- Hyper-personalized recommendations based on your goals and audiences
- Real-time feedback during every stage of the writing process from ideation to final edits
- Generative language models for creative inspiration and idea generation
- Finetuned models for specific industries and subject matters
A survey of content marketers by Semrush found that 78% believe AI will have a major impact on the future of content marketing. Top use cases they expect to grow include content personalization (59%), data analysis (50%), content optimization (46%), and content creation (45%).
As AI‘s role in the writing process expands, new questions and challenges will undoubtedly emerge – from the ethical implications of machine-generated text to the changing skills humans will need to collaborate effectively with AI. But one thing is clear: AI is not going away.
Rather than be replaced by machines, human writers who learn to work in tandem with AI will have a major advantage. They‘ll be able to offload more repetitive tasks, optimize their content for maximum impact, and unlock more bandwidth for high-level creative work and strategic thinking.
If you want to start experimenting with AI writing tools, the key is to approach them with equal parts enthusiasm and discernment. Explore the different options out there and consider which features could best support your unique needs and goals. But always keep one hand on the wheel to ensure the content aligns with your standards, brand voice, and audience expectations.
With the right human-machine balance, AI writing software can be an absolute game-changer for creating higher-quality, more impactful content in less time. As the technology continues to mature, those who harness its potential strategically will be primed to lead the pack.
The rise of AI writing assistants marks an exciting new chapter in the story of the written word – one we‘ve only just begun to author. One thing is certain: the writers of tomorrow will look very different than the writers of yesterday. Will you be one of them?
