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Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

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Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#91

Post by scottfr »

Deukhoofd wrote: post #8

Does 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.

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".

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#92

Post by nicce »

Normal_gaussian wrote: post #35
cjs_ac wrote: post #25

The 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…

Lets be fair here, this tool is new - the domain was registered on Saturday. What you suggest does seem like a good early doors feature; but the cut they've made seems to be the right one to prove market potential.

I have no idea how this tool is better than running local LLM. Should I buy it?

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#93

Post by cjs_ac »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #50
cjs_ac wrote: post #25

The 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…

So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour . If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#94

Post by johnisgood »

cjs_ac wrote: post #25

The 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…

I thought the difference between practice vs. practise was that the latter is British. My spell checker (US English) does not like "practise" though, it is underlined with red. UK English, however, does not underline "practise" with red. So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English? Because based on the spell checker, that seems to be the case.

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#95

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

beAbU wrote: post #81
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually Russian. The whole world uses American English, by virtue of US dominance in all important technical and cultural spheres.

I honestly don't think this is true. In many places outside the US our devices will default to US spelling, making it appear as if the language spoken by the locals is US English. But when you look at things like the type of English being taught in school, or the language used by the government, it'll be UK/International English.

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.

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#96

Post by Onawa »

cjs_ac wrote: post #93
dreamcompiler wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour . If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?

I don't think OP meant "arrogant" in terms of more prestigious, but in the sense of any native US-English speaker using British English spellings as a way to seem fancier or more formal.

Non-native US-English speakers are not viewed in the same light (in my opinion).

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#97

Post by mcapodici »

Languagetool is an open source tool you can run as a local spelling and grammar checker. It's different to Grammarly - less AI and more rules based. I often use both tools at the same time. I wrote a quick intro on how to self host this - https://martincapodici.com/2025/05/10/check-your-writing-usi....

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#98

Post by koiueo »

gardnr wrote: post #34

You can use a local instance of LanguageTool in a docker container for this: https://github.com/gardner/LocalLanguageTool

Gosh people love complicating things.

You don't need docker (a Linux-only piece of tech) to run a java application. Even though I'm on Linux, and docker experience is waaaaay better here than on any other platform, I wouldn't in my life consider using it to run LanguageTool.

  java -cp languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#99

Post by reconnecting »

There is no guarantee that this software will not occasionally start acting as a keylogger. If somehow this happens (let's assume not intentionally), will it be the direct responsibility of the author?

Legally, there is no entity behind that responsible for privacy (1), and honestly, I don't see even minimal reason to trust this software from a legal perspective.

1. https://refine.sh/privacy-policy

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#100

Post by koiueo »

amelius wrote: post #80

I'm really wondering if/why Grammarly still has a business case, in this age of LLMs.

It's beyond me how they still refuse to offer an official API.

Gemini subscription costs as much, allows me to do much more, and I can call it from vim or emacs without some arcane acrobatics

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