I wanted to share my discovery with you. Perhaps it has been this way for a long time? I used Apple’s AI Proofreading, and I was certain it only worked in Apple’s apps.
I assigned a keyboard shortcut directly to it in Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts…> App Shortcuts. Initially, I wanted to have the shortcut in Mail, but I randomly chose “All Applications”. Then, I had an impulse: it would be great if it worked in Arc, and it did! I later discovered that it also has a menu in several third-party apps like Chrome, Brave, BBEdit and Affinity Publisher. I have not tried it in any of those yet.
Just curious, what is the difference between ‘AI Proofreading’ and ah, ‘Good old (pre-AI swoon) Proofreading’, like, where you get squiggly lines under words that don’t match a dictionary or some grammatical reference, which has been around a long time.
Thanks for the link @gingerbeardman . Seems like a waste of developer time and money to me but I’m not the boss. So Writing Tools do more than proofread. I’ll stop the rant there…
For me, the most important thing with proofreading besides words is punctuation. English is using different rules than Norwegian, which is my main language.
I get that, totally! I am much of the time in Germany, where sentence stucture is different from my native English, as is capitalization of Nouns, gendered nouns, articles and so on.
Still, I want to represent myself in written communications so I probably look like a doofus to many but no one is correcting me and I seem to be understood, so no need here for automated corrections.
Did you get a chance to try some other apps though? is it working there?
Something bizarre has happened to Microsoft’s or Apple’s text correction algorithms: In an email in Outlook, I typed sneses; normally I would have expected it to give me senses; it gave me “smears”! And when I accidentally stuck an S into “expected” (exspected), it gave me (wait for it:) razor cuts! OMG, what is going on here? (This was on a 2018 MB Pro running Sequoia.)
I’ve used writing tools for decades—from early spellcheckers to Grammarly and now Apple’s AI. The biggest lesson? The writing is always our responsibility. Tools can guide, but we choose the words, the edits, and the message.
What excites me most about AI is its ability to shape tone—helping ideas land in a way that feels friendly, professional, or concise. Lately, I’ve been using Perplexity AI Pro not just for research, but to transform insights into posts, bullet points, or messages with real impact.
At the end of the day, like the earliest writing tools, AI is a partner. The voice and vision are still ours.
Note: Even after 9 years, Grammarly still says its tone detection is in Beta, and Apple’s Writing Tools are obviously limited. One may still stay on the sidelines or start experimenting.
