Automattic launches AI writing tool that aims to make WordPress blogs more readable and succinct

Automattic, the owner of WordPress.com, has launched a new AI tool designed to help bloggers write more clearly and succinctly.

The tool joins a swathe of writing assistants launched lately by the likes of privacy app maker Proton, as well as the mighty Google.

Write Brief with AI, as Automattic's new tool is called, complements a generative AI writing assistant Automattic launched for WordPress last year that helps users construct content using text-based prompts, and tweak the tone of their posts to be more informal or empathetic, for example.

This latest tool is more about assisting users with existing content that they've written. It's available now in beta as part of Jetpack, a suite of features that enhance WordPress.com-hosted websites' functionality, though Jetpack is available separately via a plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites. For now, Write Brief with AI is only available for WordPress.com sites (for free) during the initial beta phase, and can be accessed through the Jetpack icon in the top right of the editor.

With Write Brief with AI, WordPress tells users whether they are using too many words to describe something, inviting them to click a "Suggest" button to automatically simplify a sentence.

Similarly, it can tell users if their language lacks confidence — for example, if they're using words such as "possibly" too frequently, or whether they are using overly complex words that might alienate some readers.

At the side of the screen, the tool also gives the writers a readability score spanning three metrics — complexity, sentence length and confidence.

The WordPress web

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. The company is both a contributor to the open source, self-hosted WordPress project and the developer behind the commercial WordPress.com business. Thus, baking AI smarts into its nigh-omnipresent blogging platform is likely to help it see significant uptake.

Automattic said Write Brief with AI emerged from an in-house hack week project, and after rolling it out internally, the company decided to make it available to everyone. "We saw just how useful and beloved it quickly became, and decided to release it into the world," Automattic senior product designer Noam Almosnino wrote in a blog post.

While the broader AI writing assistant Automattic launched last year is available in a dozen languages, Write Brief with AI is limited to English for now.