QuillBot

What our experts think:

Here are the pros and cons of Quillbot, as analyzed by our reviewers.

Pros:

Free is permanent

A few of Quillbot’s features are available for free, either in a browser or in the Google Chrome extension of the app. This means you can paraphrase, summarize, and more, all without entering your credit card information.

While obviously limited compared to Quillbot Premium, there is a lot you can do with the free version. It has a competent summarizer, paraphraser, and text generator. With no daily word limit (only a limit on the length of text you are looking to edit), the free version of Quillbot is a great way to expand your vocabulary and make your writing stand out more.

Co-writer is great to use. 

Co-writer is an all-in-one program that lets you write in the browser as well as utilize all of Quillbot’s AI-powered tools. While each tool has its own separate section in Quillbot, co-writer in particular feels extremely cohesive and functional. With additional features like a search-engine powered research tool and an AI-assisted autocomplete, if I decided to stick with Quillbot as a primary writing tool, I might end up doing a lot of my writing inside Co-writer.

Cons:

Power is underwhelming

While Quillbot offers a suite of AI-powered options, so do many of its competitors. The extent that Quillbot’s features will be useful for your uses depends on the strengths of each feature, after all.

Quillbot’s free version is adequate but suffers from the same flaws as other available free AI writing assistants: its built-in features are underdeveloped and have usage restrictions, and it lacks the full range of capabilities that come with a paid subscription.

The paraphraser is okay, but it struggles with taking contextual cues from the sentence and picking the right word. Additionally, I noted that most of the changes the Quillbot paraphraser offers are easy changes: phrases or words that are one-for-one substitutions, and light reorganizing of the sentence are the extent of the paraphraser’s abilities. Sometimes, Quillbot’s understanding of the original text is far from. It was taught well enough to mostly return syntactically correct sentences, but it does not do much else.

The summarizer struggles to pick the right information too, seemingly prioritizing the subject of the first few sentences, and often ignoring other parts deeper into the original text. The shorter the summary length, the more of a chance unrelated items will get smashed together in a new sentence.

The grammar checker works well and is more sensitive to grammatical issues than Microsoft Word’s spelling checker. The citation generator was a little unfortunate, unable to find one of several published works I threw at it via name, only working on referenced works with a DOI available. When it did work, the citations were correct.

We are still in the early stages of AI, so obviously the technology is only going to get better. However, after playing around with it, I found that Quillbot’s AI performance wasn’t something I could blindly trust. You should proofread your AI all the time, especially with Quillbot.