Nice product! Does it support other language like Chinese?
Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
171–180 of 220 posts
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#172Does anyone know how this compares to other products in its field, such as LanguageTool and Harper? LanguageTool can be hosted locally, and Harper runs entirely as an extension, so I'm interested in how the spelling and grammar checks compare.
I just tested both on the text "Look Dick. See Jane. Jane run home. I says you go home to. They eats dinner." LanguageTool does what I would expect. Harper does not. However, both whine about two spaces after a period. Edit: Alas, Hacker News also removes the extra space after periods.
Harper will detect those errors in its next release.
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
I regularly correspond to people from all over the world, India, China, Brazil, France, and they all tend to use US English, thus the suggestion. Commonwealth countries are relatively minor in population compared to the USA and the rest of the world. And yes, default US spelling in devices does play a role. See prev. point about technological and cultural dominance.
> Commonwealth countries are relatively minor in population compared to the USA and the rest of the world. Given India's presence in the Commonwealth, this seems an odd assertion. 2.6 billion people live in the Commonwealth[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Commonwea...
Kinda forgot India is still part of the Commonwealth. Maybe because all Indians I ever corresponded with uniformly used US spelling, likely because they work a lot with the USA. YMMV.
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#174why is there no open source alternatives to this? Seems ripe to be just built.
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#175I tried it and it worked pretty well. I'm curious about the principle behind it. Is there any model or API being called?
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#176I see that you're using gemma3n which is a 4B parameter model and utilizes around 3GB RAM. How do you handle loading/offloading the model into the RAM? Or is it always in the memory as long as the app is running?
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#177The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence: > Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice. In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g. : > I go to my practice to practise medicine. The problem I have with this website is that it's…
Fluent American readers are likely to think "practise" is a typo. It's not even one of the commonly-known British/American spelling differences (like "color"/"colour"). Unless you know your audience is likely to be more familiar with British spelling, I'd avoid "practise."
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're building a Chrome extension grammar checker that runs locally using Chrome's built-in LLM. You can try it out here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grammit-the-ai-gram... LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".
>LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington". And they can also cause new factual mistakes that a grammar checker never would!
Preach.
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#179I see that you're using gemma3n which is a 4B parameter model and utilizes around 3GB RAM. How do you handle loading/offloading the model into the RAM? Or is it always in the memory as long as the app is running?
I can see this as a major issue. If you start using this for grammar checking, you're basically subtracting 3GB of RAM from your system.
Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a great comment I read about a decade ago from anthony_franco [0] about exactly this issue with many "open source alternatives to X", this one specifically about an alternative to Product Hunt that then failed: > OpenHunt tried solving a problem for the content makers without providing any additional benefit to the content consumers. It's a nice, heart-warming mission. But in the end of the day, content is k…
The elephant in the room here is how you ethically get people to onboard without an existing community / fomo / money. The trick is getting the content creators there, but most of them are ultimately and fairly interested in making money, and your new platform wont have that for them. Bluesky has done alright, but that was a black swan event Elon Musk inspired.
Do what reddit did, use multiple accounts as founders, and with AI I'm sure it's even easier to do so. For content-based platforms you must have content, there is no way around it and I don't see adding fake content in the beginning to be unethical, it is a solution to the cold start problem (also a good book by Andrew Chen at a16z [0]).