Type.ai: More than a Grammarly Alternative
Type doesn't live as an add-on in your document editor—it is a document editor. Its ultimate goal is to speed up the writing process without sacrificing quality. To use Type is the same as using Microsoft Word or Google Docs—you are in charge of the content and formatting. But there is one key difference: the AI writing assistant that "lives" in the interface. It turns the experience of using a word processor into something wholly different, making the following features possible:
Generating Drafts
Sometimes the first draft is the hardest to get down. It's also the least vital version of anything you write. For content writers, who often operate inside a niche and find themselves writing the same things over and over again, the first draft can be downright painful.
Creating that first draft in Type takes only a couple of minutes. You can give it the parameters of the document you're creating (like how many words, whether it's an essay or a blog post, who the target reader is) and then also supply it with other collateral. If you're working off a brief that outlines what you're supposed to write, you can hand that off to Type, along with supporting URLs and other documents that contain any facts and figures you want to include. You can also hand it examples of your own writing so that the draft will mimic your voice.
AI Rewrites
One of the more obvious features of an AI writing tool is to have it rewrite text for you—but Type's rewrite feature goes beyond simple paraphrasing. You can adjust the tone, length, and complexity of any selection of text. Need to make your writing more casual? More professional? Shorter and punchier? Longer and more detailed? The AI can handle these transformations while preserving your core message. This is particularly useful when you need to repurpose content for different audiences or platforms.
But it's also a great tool for when you're just trying to find the best way of saying something. Rewrites can be done "in-line" with Type, meaning you can just highlight the small chunk of text you want to tweak and tell the AI what changes you want. You can go back and forth with the AI, editing and revising until you've got it just right, and then replace the original with that finished text directly into the document body with a single button click.
Type Chat
All of that rewriting dialogue you had with your AI assistant can also happen in the chat sidebar. Beyond these little rewrites, Type's Chat feature is like having a personal on-call editor with 24/7 availability. Now, when you can't remember what that French phrase is for when you think of the perfect thing to say later in the evening while going upstairs, all you have to do is ask.
The chat also has an option to make the chatbot "document aware," meaning that it can analyze all the text and give you feedback. If you're afraid you used a word too much, ask it to highlight all the times it appears in the doc. The chat can help you with things beyond simple writing tasks, too, like giving suggestions to make the document more SEO-friendly.
Document Review
If you've ever worked with a Track Changes tool in your word processor, Type's document review feature will feel familiar. The one step in the review process it removes is having another human read it and make suggestions. Instead, you tell Type what you want it to look for in the document, and it will make suggestions that you can either accept or reject.
Content Ideas
When you're staring at a blinking cursor and need inspiration, Type acts as a constant source of forward momentum in your writing process. When you're mid-paragraph and unsure where to take your argument next, you can highlight what you've written and ask Type to suggest logical next steps. Sometimes you just need help with a transition to a new idea, and sometimes you don't even know what that next idea should be.
Type has a "Content Ideas" side bar that doesn't just give you generic suggestions—it analyzes your existing content and gives you a running list of ways to keep things moving within the piece's overall direction.
Inline Commands
For you keyboard warriors out there who get into a clickety-clackety flow state with your typing, you can access many of Type's features without ever reaching for a mouse/trackpad. Simply typing a forward slash inside the document editor brings up a list of commands you can access to finish your sentence, or write a new one, or a list, or a section headline.
Real Quick: Type’s Features and Benefits
Grammarly: More Teacher than Editor
More known for its Chrome extension for identifying mechanical mistakes in your writing, Grammarly also offers a standalone Premium product that includes AI text generation. Still, you'll see from the feature highlights that the focus of Grammarly is more about polishing up existing writing and learning some fundamentals. It's mechanics over creativity, and caters more to the user who needs instruction more than collaboration.
Error Checking
Grammarly made a name for itself with its in-line error checking, highlighting spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, and bad grammar as you type it. By now, we're all familiar with the red and blue underlines in our documents and how to deal with them—Grammarly may have perfected this functionality.
Tone Analysis
One of the ways in which AI is implemented well in Grammarly is in the way it analyzes and improves writing tone. By "tone," we mean the overall quality of the voice: professional, conversational, casual, those kinds of things. The best writers are aware of—and can control—their tone, but that kind of awareness takes time. Grammarly can analyze your own writing tone, and help you to adjust your text where it needs to be. This is extra helpful in cases where the wrong tone can undermine your message.
Inclusive Language
Better late than never, the world has started to catch on that words often have a power beyond their simple definitions. This heightened awareness means that what is and is not acceptable speech is changing frequently. Grammarly Premium has a built-in awareness of those touchy words and phrases—not just obvious slurs but also those subtle phrases that reinforce systemic inequities. We're talking about terms like "mankind" instead of "humankind," or casually referring to a business meeting as a "powwow."
Plagiarism Checker
Grammarly's plagiarism detection system works like many others, scanning your content "against billions of web pages" to identify potential matches. Like other plagiarism detection systems, it is prone to false positives now and again. We tested it ourselves, and it flagged an original phrase we wrote, "Artificial intelligence (AI) has the ability to significantly..." The system identified this as having come from an interview with Tim Cook that our team had never encountered. Still, false positives are tolerable when it's also flagging real plagiarism.
AI Citation Generator
Understanding the growing importance of AI disclosure in academic and professional writing, Grammarly offers an automated citation tool. This feature generates properly formatted citations in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles, helping writers maintain academic integrity without having to remember all the arcane structural rules about citing in each format.
Performance Score
To quantify writing quality, Grammarly implements a scoring system that evaluates multiple factors including word count, reading level, and vocabulary usage. This score isn't arbitrary—it's calculated within the context of your chosen document goals, providing a meaningful metric for improvement. The system helps writers track their progress and identify areas for enhancement.
Grammarly Assistant
The centerpiece of Grammarly's AI functionality resides in its Assistant feature, which appears as a pop-up window interface. This dynamic tool adapts its AI shortcuts based on your text selection, offering contextual suggestions for improvement. While it provides a comprehensive list of writing ideas and one-click revision options, it has one notable limitation: users can't preview suggested changes within their document's context before applying them.
Real Quick: Grammarly’s Features and Benefits
Grammarly vs Type: What's the Difference?
When evaluating websites like Grammarly and their alternatives, remember: different tools serve different needs. Both Type and Grammarly are AI-powered writing assistants, but they approach the task of helping writers from fundamentally different angles. Let's break down the key differences—and overlap—between the two to help you decide which one better suits your needs. Here's how they stack up:
Under the Hood: Large Language Models (LLMs)
At the heart of both Type and Grammarly's generative text features are the LLMs that power them. Type offers you a choice between Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT. Each of these LLMs has its own strengths, and you can switch between them depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Grammarly's LLM was developed in-house, and they've been fairly quiet about its details. We can safely guess that it was trained in a way that supports Grammarly's mission of polishing up text and focusing on mechanics and writing goals.
One thing that's important to know about LLMs is that their use is limited by the developers. AI processing is intensive and costly, so users aren't going to get unfettered access to it. With Type, you can avoid limits altogether by using Speed mode, which is the faster (and less processor-intensive) method of generating text. In Power mode we use rate-limiting to make sure our users stay within bounds, but we've set it up in such a way that you should never reach the limit. If you do, you can email us hello@type.ai to request a one time reset.
Grammarly Premium sets its limits by the number of prompts its users can submit each month: 2,000. On its own, this would be enough, but bear in mind that if you don't like the results and rephrase your request, it still counts toward your limit. The good news is there's a limit counter in Grammarly so you know where you stand.
Writing Tone, Voice, and Style
Both tools are able to adjust their writing style according to your preferences, but each handles it a different way. With Type, you can include a description of the tone/voice that you want with each writing prompt you give it. For example, "Write a 2,000 word blog post showing the differences between Type and Grammarly Premium in a conversational, but still professional, tone." Alternatively you can upload a reference document and just tell Type to mimic the style found in it. While you can't save a profile of your voice/style for later use, you can save a prompt—including the instructions you gave for the writing style.
Grammarly's approach is to move everything into a uniform style: namely, your unique voice. The more you use it, the more it learns and analyzes your writing style—it then starts making suggestions based on that. You can also define different "voice" profiles to use for different bits of writing—documents might be more formal, messages more casual. Each profile has a number of descriptors you can choose from to adjust the voice (e.g. enthusiastic, serious, etc.), but there's no way to provide it with an example to mimic.
Research
Neither Type nor Grammarly are meant to be used as a research assistant; in both apps, the AI chat assistant is working off of a static LLM and a knowledge cutoff date. You should be careful not to ask anything of your AI assistant that requires real-time knowledge.
With that said, Type is able to at least retrieve and incorporate new information when you use it to generate a draft. If you need facts and figures incorporated into your writing, you can add what are called "knowledge sources" when you're creating the prompt that will write your first draft. You still need to do the research yourself. But you can compile it all into a document which you'll attach like a copy brief, or you can just give Type the URLs that contain the information you want to include.
Proofreading
This is, of course, in Grammarly's wheelhouse and what makes it a great product for someone who needs extra guidance with their writing. Not only does it highlight errors as you make them and offer fixes, it often explains why something is wrong or gives more context on the grammatical rule at play.
Type can proofread your work, but you need to explicitly ask it to. You can get a quick mechanics check through the Review feature (discussed earlier), where you can either accept or reject the suggestion. Or you can engage through the chat window by asking Type to look for and fix specific things. Think of the difference between the two like this: with Grammarly, you're in a class and asking the teacher to educate you. With Type, you're in a writer's workshop and asking your peer for input.
Real Quick: Major Differences between Type and Grammarly
TL;DR: Choose Your Writing Companion
To put it as simply as possible: one option exists to improve your writing, the other exists to improve the writing process. If you're looking to learn better writing habits and mechanics, Grammarly is your best bet. Its focus on instruction and real-time corrections makes it an excellent tool for students, non-native English speakers, or anyone wanting to strengthen their fundamental writing skills. When it comes to these features, quality Grammarly alternatives are few and far between.
But if you're already comfortable with your writing abilities and are looking to streamline your workflow, Type focuses on the entire writing process—from ideation through final edits—which makes it particularly valuable for content creators, professional writers, or anyone who spends significant time crafting documents. Where Grammarly teaches you the rules of writing, Type inspires you to break them when necessary. Using an AI writing tool shouldn’t leave your work sounding like it was written by AI.
The choice ultimately depends on what you need most: a teacher or a collaborator.
.png)
.png)
.png)