Grammarly

Grammarly is a Ukraine-founded cloud-based typing assistant, headquartered in San Francisco. It reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes in English texts, detects plagiarism, and suggests replacements for the identified errors. It also allows users to customize their style, tone, and context-specific language.

Grammarly was launched in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko, Max Lytvyn, and Dmytro Lider. Grammarly is available as a standalone application for use with desktop programs, a browser extension optimized for Google Docs, and a smartphone keyboard.

Grammarly is developed by Grammarly Inc., with a hub in San Francisco, California, and offices in Kyiv, New York City, Vancouver, and Berlin.

History
Grammarly was founded by Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko, and Dmytro Lider, the creators of My Dropbox, an app that checks essays for plagiarism. Grammarly was initially designed as an educational app to help university students improve their English skills. It was later offered to the end customers who use English in everyday life.

In early 2018, Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher at Google who was formerly part of Google's Project Zero team, discovered a vulnerability in Grammarly's browser extension beta version, which exposed authentication tokens to websites and potentially allowed them to access the users' documents and other data. Within a few hours, the company released a hotfix and reported that it found no evidence of compromised user data. Later in December, Grammarly launched a bug bounty program on HackerOne, offering a US$100,000 reward to the first white hat hacker to access a specific document on the company's server.

Grammarly effectively severed all business relations with users in Russia and Belarus in response to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The company also announced that it would donate the net revenue earned in Russia and Belarus since 2014 to Ukraine. It also provided free access to Ukrainian media, which reported on the war in English. In April 2023, Grammarly launched a beta-stage product using generative AI called Grammarly GO, built on the GPT-3 large language models. The software can generate and re-write content based on prompts.

Reception
Reviewers have praised Grammarly for its ease of use and helpful suggestions, considering it worthwhile despite its relatively high price and lack of offline functionality. Josh Steimle of Forbes lauded it in 2013, saying "It's an online services [sic] that quickly and easily makes your writing better and makes you sound like a pro, or at least helps you avoid looking like a fool." Conversely, some users have criticized Grammarly for incorrect suggestions, ignorance of tone and context, and reduction of writers' freedom of expression.

The result of using Grammarly has occasionally been accused of being AI-generated by detection engines such as Turnitin. Schools are struggling to develop rules about its use that are consistent and fair, with some teachers recommending Grammarly to all of their students and others rejecting it.