System-Level Integration Shift

A story about how Grammarly evolved from a slow academic tool to a real-time writing assistant.

"The initial version of Grammarly only worked for a very small audience and use case. It wasn't real-time - you'd write a book chapter or research paper, submit it to Grammarly, then go make a cup of coffee, drink it, wait a bit more, and then it would give you results. About half were real issues and half were false positives.

The academic audience was fine with this because if you spent two months writing a book, what's an extra half hour to review potential issues? But that wouldn't work for business writers - if you're writing a business email that needs to be sent in 20 seconds, you can't deal with false positives.

We recently switched from being primarily a Chrome plugin to our flagship product being operating system level integration. This happened in December, just about a month ago. Now it works similarly to a Chrome plugin but integrates with all apps, not just web apps. It expands Grammarly's surface area - it's in Microsoft PowerPoint, Oracle applications, wherever you want basically."