Grammarly Keyboard
Avoid many of you’re most embarrassing mistake
Free From Grammarly, grammarly.com For iPhone, iPad Needs iOS 9.3 or later
You’re bound to have encountered the ability of iOS’ keyboard to spot a missing apostrophe — and to insert one even when it doesn’t need to. The prospect of a better keyboard whose reason for existing is to ensure good spelling and grammar is tantalizing.
Grammarly promises a sophisticated grammar checker, a contextual spelling checker, advanced punctuation correction, vocabulary enhancements, and a synonym finder. That’s all welcome, even if you consider yourself a strong writer. But constrain your celebratory carousing for a moment.
Grammarly’s top row shows suggested amendments as you type. Tap one and the change is made, or you can later run through the tool’s feedback in the hope of learning mistakes to avoid in future.
In many cases it does a good job, but not always. You can use it in almost any app, so you might think it’ll help with anything from business reports to school work — and it will, but it overlooks some basic errors. The “you’re” in “Thanks for you’re present” went undetected, for example. When we requested a doublecheck, we were told our text had been “checked for hundreds of types of writing issues” and none was found.
Grammarly is attractive and does pick up plenty of mistakes but, until tools like this can truly infer meaning, use it, and other tools like it, with caution.
The bottom line. Although it’s often effective, exceptions make us reluctant to trust Grammarly’s breezy assurances.