QuillBot’s Smart AI is Making Writers’ Lives Easier

Last October, I wrote an honest review for QuillBot, and what can I say? My research converted me into a premium subscriber to the ever-growing online tool.

More than a mere grammar tool, QuillBot is a suite of writing tools wrapped up in one tidy online hub, and the benefits of signing up for their premium membership were too good to ignore.

That was then.

Now that QuillBot has added even more useful features for writers, students, and everyone in between, the possibilities for better AI features and SEO capabilities as technology advances make it a genuine contender in the competitive market of online tools.

Before we run away with ourselves and the possibilities of future tech, let's look at what QuillBot is, and what the clever devs have been up to.

QuillBot

For an extensive look at QuillBot, it might be best to read my original article, which is full of information and pretty screenshots to help you unpack all the goodies.

QuillBot: A "Sweet" Suite of Writing Tools You Can't Live Without Six writing tools wrapped up in one pretty package make this application hard to ignore.

For the TL;DR version, however, I'm happy to go over the tools briefly for you.

QuillBot is quite literally a "quill robot," since a quill is a writing tool all on its own, and as a writing bot, it allows you to write more clearly and concisely, if not better altogether. It comes equipped with a plethora of tools, such as the:

The (twelve!) features are fairly self-explanatory, but QuillBot's success stems primarily from its paraphrasing tools. Besides the obvious usefulness of rephrasing potentially confusing or overly lengthy sentences into readable content, it also helps to prevent plagiarism.

It also has decent grammatical suggestions, and the summarizer is great for taking content and summarizing it in a shorter or more reader-friendly version of the original, such as a list. For example, take a look at this incredible summary of the first few paragraphs of The Lord of The Rings:

Gives a pretty accurate and blessedly brief character description of our beloved Bilbo Baggins, if you ask me.

The newer features and enhancements, however, really knock this suite of tools out of the park — especially QuillBot's shiny new co-writer.

Enhanced co-writer

I admittedly got a little excited when I tried out QuillBot's co-writer back in October as I wrote my first review, and it's been improving ever since. It's just so good.

Usually, ideas are pretty organic for me, but every once in a while I can think of a topic I'd like to write about, but the content doesn't quite fill up the page. Sadly, most of those ideas fizzle out, and I move on to the next before I've ever fully brainstormed any of them to completion.

The co-writer always offered suggestions for text (something that is very useful while responding to emails, by the way, if you use the web extension) but its new feature lets you map out the entire article by simply entering a topic.

You read that correctly — all I did for the point-form outline below was enter the phrase "gardening for beginners" and specify that I was writing a blog post, and it pumped out this glorious outline (that you can bet your behind I'll be using for this very topic sometime soon.)

There it is; everything I need to cover is all mapped out for me. It has all the necessary prompts, including a clearly defined need for a conclusion, and it covers virtually anything I would need to cover.

Here's another example:

The phrase "living room decor" served as inspiration for this outline, and all a writer would need to do now is fill in the content — more than half of the work has been done using the tool's clever AI. Seriously, three little words created an entire outline, and it blew me away.

There is also a lot of helpful writing advice when selecting the "template" option within the co-writer. For example, there is a "blog post" template that helps writers determine and outline the kind of blog post they need to create:

I can say with total honesty that this little blurb alone gave me several blogging ideas and even potential titles, and it's just a generated template. I created something like this myself years ago, but it was less detailed and not organized nearly as well — this is pure gold.

Multilingual paraphraser

QuillBot also has a pretty impressive multilingual paraphraser that they've recently rolled out, and from my limited experience writing in multiple languages, it's pretty good.

It's not as common for a writer to produce articles in multiple languages, but if you run a start-up or work for someone who has a varied clientele, there's a good chance this tool would be vital to your day-to-day correspondence. I tried out the above sentence with a few other translators, and as someone who speaks the tiniest bit of French already, it seemed pretty accurate. However, the results I saw after some further research confirmed it.

I also reversed it and retranslated it a few times all over the internet using Google Translate and other tools, and while I would probably have used "bonjour" or even "salut" rather than "salutations," the rest is very natural and accurate.

This is a very cool feature that I can imagine will help out students immensely, particularly if they are struggling with a certain sentence structure within the language they are learning.

I can say for certain this would have helped me immeasurably when I was trying to learn German.

Translator

If the paraphraser is a little more nuanced than what you need, QuillBot has another new feature: the translator.

Similar in most ways to Google Translate, this directly translates the text into English, or whatever language you need it to be:

What's neat about this is that you can translate your text to English and then hop over to your paraphraser or summarizer to make sure that it's grammatically correct and more natural to native English speakers—something that might be a challenge if English is your second (or eighth) language.

Being able to communicate clearly in whatever language you need could be the one piece you need to clinch any deal, so it's a vital tool.

It's also useful outside of work-related situations, such as if you are on vacation or find yourself in a conversation with someone who speaks another language. It takes time and effort to learn a new language and understand certain dialects, so having a tool in your literal pocket to help you with that can be as useful as it is appreciated to a non-English speaker.

It's also kind of fun to play around with other languages. On that note, I'd love to learn how to properly tell you:

Tack för att du tog dig tid att läsa denna artikel; Jag hoppas att du har funnit översättningsverktyget användbart!

(That's Swedish for: Thank you for taking the time to read this article; I hope you've found the translator tool useful!)

Free vs. paid

Full disclosure: I've been using QuillBot Premium for months now. I found the premium tools extremely helpful in my day-to-day writing and have even used QuillBot for my fiction writing when a particular sentence is proving tricky or I don't like the way something is worded. The paraphraser is great for knocking some ideas into my head when I'm feeling stuck, so as you can imagine, I use it an awful lot!

Here is the breakdown between the free and premium plans:

A lot more is offered with the premium plan; it ought to, in my opinion, in order to make it worth the monthly fee of $19.95. The premium highlights: more words in the paraphraser, more words in the summarizer, tone and comparisons, and full use of various features like the synonym slider.

I think the takeaway from the premium plan is that it offers customization and variety, and that's worth a lot. You can really meddle with the sliders (which change a number of settings) and work out how you want your writing to sound to your readers.

You can also take the recommended rewrites into consideration, and often, that's wise — there have been many times I've written a sentence I thought was fine, but the rewrite option was 10 times better.

If you're a student — especially a student working on a big written project — premium is a great idea as well, if only for the plagiarism checker and citation generator (which is available in the free version, but it's worth mentioning alongside the plagiarism checker.) When you're faced with a looming assignment deadline, you might need all the help you can get with those smaller, but vital, details.

Writing is hard…

…but it doesn't have to be. QuillBot can help.

Online writing is even trickier, what with the competition and the overly saturated markets we're trying to break into. We need to do what we can to keep ahead of the curve, and investing in an online suite of tools like QuillBot is a great place to start.

The paraphraser is what made QuillBot popular, but I also think they've added considerable acclaim to their product with the co-writer and summarizer features. Being able to organize all of your work and tools in one spot is another bonus, since QuillBot houses them all in one tidy package, and it's so easy to find all of your previous projects and templates.

With the enhancements they've made to the co-writer and the newly included language translator and paraphraser, QuillBot is clearly making a play for a top spot among its contenders. To sweeten the deal, they've also included online extensions for Chrome, Microsoft Word, and macOS, so whether you do all of your writing in Word or directly on Medium, you can take advantage of the entire package.

QuillBot is making writer's lives easier every day, so why don't you join the rest of us? It's a choice that could speed up your writing and editing process, and it might even improve the quality of your work. Whether you choose the free service or decide to invest in yourself and test out the premium, I have a feeling you won't regret it.

I know I don't.

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