I would gladly pay $40 extra just for this feature.
Thjere are so many words that i t should be easy to correct using AI or some kind iof more sophisticvated dictionary. Could Scrivener be construcftged so as to bae able to catch these errors and correct htem easily?>
Yes, I know and have Typinator, and that’s great. But there’s na ooportutniy to tbe so much better.
Whenever a feature that you think should be “easy” turns out to not exist, it probably isn’t as easy as you thought.
Both Grammarly and ProWritingAid work inside Scrivener, finding these typo’s easily.
Well, ok, but it’s a high value feature for which people would pay a lot.
Oh – will either of them correct them for you automatically?
It will show you the error and suggest corrections.
Ah, that’s too bad. I can get that with a spellcheck. It would be so much more helpful if it were just like autocorrect – and corrected as one typed.
I do not use these apps. but there might be a setting to do as you want. perhaps try.
This is a “I have no intention of learning from my mistakes” mode?!
No, it’s a “this is more convenient for me” mode. It’s strange the moral judgment that goes with these kinds of questions. I’m perfectly capable of seeing what my mistakes are, and I’m capable of correcting them myself. It would be faster and more efficient if they were corrected for me, as computers are fully capable of doing.
I don’t know if I’d describe it as a “moral” judgement - at least not in terms of good / evil! But, yeah… you’re right that there was some judgement in there.
There’s an argument to be made on both sides of the pro-efficiency vs just-lazy perspectives on the issue, and it’s probably obvious to any observer which perspective we both take. For my money, any skill not practiced atrophies, whether it’s literally muscles atrophying and losing strength when you stop lifting weights, or “muscle memory” fading in your fingers when you stop playing guitar, or neural pathways re-routing when you stop speaking in a foreign language every day.
The more you rely on automatic spell correctors, the worse your spelling becomes over time, and relying on “AI” autofixing your errors without you even glancing at them will have (I believe - I have no scientific sources for this) a worse and faster deteriorating impact. Of course, you can argue that it doesn’t matter - you genuinely don’t need to know your times tables or be able to do mental arithmetic anymore because we all always have calculators on us. So maybe we don’t actually need to know how to spell or “do” grammar either if the technology exists to compensate and is embedded into everything going forward.
Of course, if that’s the case we’ll all be screwed if we ever have to write something on a piece of paper or on an internet forum which doesn’t have it enabled. Every post will look like your first one in this thread — which I sincerely hope was typed like that ironically.
One important issue not mentioned thus far, even the best spell checking apps REGULARLY stuff up, inserting incorrect ‘corrections’ that bear no relation to the intended word.
Personally I’d rather run something like PWA AFTER I complete my work in a read through, considering suggestions and making a decision on the wisdom of their suggestion. (Grammar/Spell at the same time)
I’m just going to say, with as much indifference and neutrality as I can, that when suggesting AI features within an application specifically used for writing–and in the early drafting stages no less–you’re going to get a lot of pushback from that app’s community a) because as writers they value the process even when it’s a lot of work and sucks, and b) because they value what they’re working on enough to be apprehensive about such an emergent technology, especially one that is currently being used, in certain iterations, to scrape the creative ideas that are passed through it.
Scrivener is a software specifically for writers, created by writers, who are working on a variety of large projects in many different stages of the process; be it fiction, academic, screenwriting, journaling, or journalism. I personally use it for both fiction writing and academic writing.
I stopped using Grammerly as a spellcheck when they instituted AI and if Scrivener were to do so, despite being a heavily commited user on Mac, Windows, and iOS, for twelve years or so–I would also leave. I assume other’s would too.
I would also like to point out that most of us don’t really worry about that happening here as we understand the impetus behind the softwares creation and those that work on and in it.
As always I can’t speak for Keith.
But to my knowledge there are no competent “local use only” AI tools. That is, they all rely on remote data centers for their analyses, and therefore require that a remote data center have access to the data being analyzed. A core value of Scrivener is that we don’t have access to your data. The only way to reconcile those two sentences would be to make any hypothetical AI functionality strictly opt-in. Most likely – again in my personal opinion only – via the same sort of “open” connection we provide for bibliography tools.
AI is great. I love AI.
Chat and Claude are good places to bounce ideas, or to find alternative viewpoints, summarize articles.
AI in Scrivener, not so much. What would be the purpose of it - in the current state.
PWA works well enough after you have written. Worrying about spelling and grammar while you are writing is a great way to kill the flow.
Now in the future if you could get AI to find plot holes, inconsistencies in character descriptions etc…, flag pacing issues, use AI to find related notes quickly (RAG), I could see that be a way to accelerate learning to write. It would be great to have a story bible that is queryable . Not unlike having a chat with a pdf but based on your own notes - what planet was this charter from, what color were his eyes, given this psychological profile , do these actions seems plausible (this is stretching things).
But, I would not like to see L+L develop Scrivener in this direction. L+L should be focussed on creating the best writing experience. The current state of AI add more distractions.
Projection for the far future of AI: Let me put on my VR headset and walk in an environment that I have created with a few words in Sora, so I could get an immersive experience that I could write about.