WordPress parent Automattic has launched Write Brief with AI to help make documents more concise. Available for free to WordPress.com users, Write Brief with AI measures “readability,” suggests edits and will even make them for you. It identifies complex words and offers alternatives and focuses on simplifying convoluted sentences — all from within the editor function in the WordPress dashboard. Write Brief with AI is now built-in to Jetpack for those who host through WordPress.com, available only in English, though the company says it is working to expand language support.

Although the Jetpack suite of tools is available as a plugin for those who self-host sites that are built via WordPress.org, the company says that in the beta phase Write Brief with AI is only available for WordPress.com sites.

Write Brief with AI evolved from software developed internally to help WordPress.com workers improve global communications. What started as “a hack week project” to create a writing tool that could be used by everyone at Automattic caught fire, the company explains in a blog post, adding that “we saw just how useful and beloved it quickly became and decided to release it into the world.”

“The new tool helps users construct content using text-based prompts and tweak the tone of their posts to be more informal or empathetic, for example,” reports TechCrunch, adding that “it can tell users if their language lacks confidence — for example, if they’re using words such as ‘possibly’ too frequently.”

A “suggest” button offers sentence alternatives, and readability ratings are displayed in a sidebar.

“While ChatGPT has emerged as the poster child for the generative AI movement, Automattic sits in a somewhat privileged position as the driving force behind much of the web as we know it,” opines TechCrunch, pointing out that “the company is both a contributor to the open source, self-hosted WordPress project and the developer behind the commercial WordPress.com business.”

WordPress is not alone in offering AI writing assistants, which are available from Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn and Zoom, as well as startups like Proton, among others.

SiliconANGLE points out that Grammarly offers an AI writing product (one it says will actually write for you, while the WordPress tool only improves what you’ve already written).