As announced by Automattic and covered by TechCrunch, I want to take a moment to welcome Elijah Potter and Harper to join Automattic. Harper is a super-fast (way faster than LanguageTool and Grammarly), local English grammar checker. The technology is nascent, but I’m very excited to embed this throughout all of Automattic’s products, and then expanding it to other languages, all in an open source way that can be embedded everywhere. I’m a huge fan of Grammarly and use it every day, but I think we’re doing too much in the cloud right now and there is so much compute and potential at the edge, and I’m excited to drive that forward with projects like Harper, Gutenberg, and Playground.
Congrats Matt and co. Great to see more tech gravitating towards edge computing – so much potential there, which can be realized much more sustainably than in the current all-in-the-cloud realm.
I wonder how this compares against Apple’s Grammar checker‽ I also use Grammarly as it helps correct grammar without significantly altering my style (Apple tends to completely alter what I typed, although the latter is still useful).
Wow, I never knew about Harper! I’ve long refused to use Grammarly et al on account of the “cloudy”, potentially-data-harvesting nature of such a product, but I’m really excited to see what Harper can do… and it could be super-impactful to see it rolled-out as an optional feature for WordPress.com, Tumblr, etc.
I like the part about extending it to other languages. There are a lot of cool tools for English, but nobody thinks about people from other countries.