(Not sure if this should go into Tool Suggestions or just Site Development, feel free to let me know)
I find LanguageTool’s marketing and presentation to be really similar to Canary Mail’s, and I would like LanguageTool to be removed just as much.
Paraphrasing feature sends some text to AI, and I don’t think they’re using something like Apple’s Private Cloud Compute
Privacy policy outright states they participate in surveillance ****ism and use Google Analytics, so even if most text isn’t stored, metadata is still tracked Privacy Policy - LanguageTool
Even if they say they don’t store most inputted text, this makes it really hard to trust them.
If self hosting became the only way that this tool is recommended, maybe the Language Tool section could be lumped in with Office Suites to become something like Office Tools.
I’m surprised nobody commented on this. I have been using LT for years, before it was even recommended by some people in the privacy community. Even if you take AI out of the equation, I have always been disturbed by the fact that spellchecking apps, especially those that require an account, can read everything you type. The only reason I use LT is because I feel like I have no choice. This is why I am rooting for Proton Scribe to succeed. IMO, they should combine it with Standard Notes, but also make it available as a standalone app for spellchecking.
Yeah I’m not sure we necessarily need a slightly better version of grammarly. We shouldn’t be asking people to send all their text to some service. Now especially you have local AI models that can be used for grammar checking also which I don’t think was really the case when it was added. Most programs where you’re inputting text also come with a spellchecker by default as well. Overall I think it’s minimally useful and only getting less compelling as local AI models get better.
They also have a bunch of extensions they want you to install which I don’t want to encourage.
Don’t know about the status post-AI and post Learneo.
I worked during the summer period of 2019, to improve the French correction of the tool, as a rule editor.
I do point out again, that despite my job, where in the ideal situation, we will get context or full sent strings potentially from users, we didn’t get any of that at LanguageTool.
We only had access to the most popular 10 added words to tool (so we could add additional common used words, abreviations and brands and other nouns to the dictionary) as well as user reports from their forums, or reported ones from their social medias team.
No more, no less.
Language tool offer a local only version of the tool, no internet needed.
Perhaps that was the original recommendation in the website ?
Its very hard to find thought. You need to browse to a index of blank page, offering the download of the classic java version. The graphical user interface is bad, and slow to uses. But it’s the best I found privacy wise for now . It’s local, it consume like 1gb of memory and can suggest correction bit also open exactly the ruleset that explain the correction.
I needed to create a batch file with direct launch from java to start the http server and offer local language tool support to the browser extension and external text editor.
The newer version (totally different version) offered on the website require creating an account with email .. Probably has a bad privacy policy. They took the open source and privacy respecting version and made it mostly proprietary.
Since its so hard to find a local version, I would give my vote to remove it. After that… is there better software ? Maybe well need to switch to harm reduction in this category.
The PR here suggests only recommending LanguageTool-based extensions that actually bundle self-hosted LanguageTool by default (such as—but not limited to—LTeX for VSCode). If they simply use LanguageTool’s cloud servers we shouldn’t recommend them.
Depending what we do (remove, adapt), there might be value to show how to configure the language tool browser extension to use the local http server/API. If your plan is to bundle self-hosted version in vscode, that would kind of not work and its not a good approach.
The point is that the VS Code extension bundles the local version for you automatically, and I don’t think the browser extension does. If we find other extensions for other editors or browsers that work the same way LTeX for VSCode does we can list them alongside this one though.
I’ll check the browser extension again though, I didn’t get a chance to last night.
Hmmm. I still think Language Tool is an improvement over Grammarly. But I see the points about it maybe not being the most trustworthy.
I would personally vote for it to stay.
I also think inviting folks to install a VS Code extension feels odd. Most of our recommendations aren’t targeted at developers who would already have something like VS Code installed. Seems like this wouldn’t apply to a big percentage of the user base.
It doesn’t even need to be installed, you just download the latest release and unpack the archive. I wrote a small bash script that runs the grammar check of a specific text file. Then, if I need to check something else, I just edit the file and run the script again.
Still not as “straight-forward” as LanguageTool’s web editor, but it gets the job done and is simple to use.
. It’s local, it consume like 1gb of memory and can suggest correction bit also open exactly the ruleset that explain the correction.