ShortlyAI: The Best AI Writing Tool You’ve Never Heard of :)

AI writing apps are hot right now. There are a lot of apps out there to help you write like Hemingway, write in a new persona, or use AI to create the perfect title for your work. If you’re looking for an app that will do the heavy lifting for you… ShortlyAI might be just what you need. Read on for my full and honest ShortlyAI review….

Before we start, I want to point out that my main usage for any AI writing app is to help me write long form blog articles. Therefore, this review will be mostly focused on this.

What is ShortlyAI?

ShortlyAI is a writing application that uses AI to generate text. It’s an application that has been designed to help you write better and generate better blog posts. It has a very simple UI (user interface) but is surprisingly powerful.

A lot of other AI writing tools that I have tried (and I have tried a lot) go more for an input and generation style system, meaning that you input some data and get your text output into a box for your to copy and paste into your article. Whereas ShortlyAI works more as an AI based content assistant.

It lets you type first and has a ‘write for me’ button so that you can prompt the AI writer to take over for a while. ShortlyAI is one of the few tools that I have seen trying this approach. It certainly makes a refreshing change.

How Much is ShortlyAI?

ShortlyAI have gone for a fixed monthly price for their AI writing tool. If you pay month to month, it will cost you $39.99 a month at the time of writing. However, if you are willing to pay for a year in advance, this will go down to $24.99. It should also be noted that ShortlyAI have a 3 day trial, which allows you to try out the AI generation for yourself before you commit.

Main Features of ShortlyAI

All in all, ShortlyAI has a lot of features. I’ve been focusing on the main features that I have found to be useful and interesting as a content writer myself. Here are some of the most important ones:

Simple User Interface

The interface is very simple in nature, being based pretty much exclusively around their text editing app. This makes it very intuitive to use for anyone that is used to the word processor style which will be a lot of people.

‘Write for me’ mode

When writer’s block hits you hard, simply press the ‘write for me’ button and the AI text generator will take over. If you are not happy with what was just created, you can click the undo or regenerate button to get a better result. You can also adjust how much content is generated each time using a handy slider.

Article Brief

Whilst creating content in the text editor, you can add an article brief in a small box at the side that will give the AI some more context to work with and potentially better outputs.

Output Length

Whilst writing in the ShortlyAI editor, you can use a slider to change the amount of text that is generated each time you click the ‘write for me’ button. This is vital at the moment, when most writing AI is not good at longer form content. If you find the output quality is not as good as you need, being able to change output length helps a lot.

ShortlyAI Text Commands

Instead of having writing functions in menus, ShortlyAI have instead implemented these as text commands.

For example, by typing /instruct [write about the current weather in New York.] in the ShortlyAI editor you are telling the app exactly what you want. You can refine this further by adding plus or minus signs at the end with keywords you want the app to talk more or less about. So if you typed /instruct [write about the current weather in New York. +++Sunny -Storms] you are encouraging more talk on sunny weather and less on storms!

There are other commands you can use, such as /rewrite /shorten and /expand (which should all be fairly self explanatory!

Based on OpenAI GPT-3: Like a lot of ShortlyAI’s competitors, they are based on the OpenAI GPT-3 framework.

Original Output

Whatever you output from ShortlyAI is totally and utterly original and won’t trigger any red flags in your plagiarism checkers!

What I Like about ShortlyAI?

Quality of Output

It is quite interesting to me that many of ShortlyAI’s competitors are using a similar framework but can rarely match the quality and consistency provided by them. For me, this is the number one consideration over all others. The number one reason I use an AI writing tool is to help me quickly write high quality yet original text, and ShortlyAI is among the top providers that can do this.

As ShortlyAI and a lot of its competitors use the same base framework (GPT-3/ OpenAI based), it then comes down to how well you train the AI. ShortlyAI are clearly very good at this, it’s the only AI tool that has ‘wowed’ me with some of its outputs.

It Connects the Dots

The major problem I have had with a lot of other tools is that they are not good at long form content, which then leads me to have to generate lots of small blurps to piece together. For most other AI writing tools they simply don’t understand that these individual generations are linked and therefore its up to you to do the linking yourself.

The fact that you can seamlessly type and ask the ShortlyAI to type in one text editor gets around this issue, as the AI seems to know what is around the text generation and automatically makes its output relevant. This is one ofthe most elegant AI writing solutions I have seen.

Value

ShortlyAI presents a crazy amount of value to me. One of their biggest competitors at the time of writing is Conversion.AI, a service that will cap you at 20,000 generated words a month. No such issues here. For the same subscription price, you get unlimited text generation with ShortlyAI.

The thing is, AI writing tools are still relatively new and errors happen even in the best tools. Therefore, if you are on a credit based system, these errors will lead to the need for extra generations and your monthly quota will quickly become drained. No such issues with ShortlyAI.

Simple

Some people may hate the lack of menus in ShortlyAI, but for me it just creates a clean environment where I can focus more on the content than all the different bells and whistles. Rather than giving you access to a million and one content generation templates (like so many other tools do) ShortlyAI hides this away in the background.

Commands

I have a sense that other people may hate the fact they can’t just click a button to get the different parts of content created. But for me, the command system is perfect for someone that writes a lot of content.

This is mainly because you can easily chain these commands together in a structure that you can use each time you want to write an article in the app. Very handy!

For example, if I wanted to write long form content on the ‘Best AI Writing Tool’ I could run through this chain of commands:

/instruct [write an introduction to Best AI Writing Tool]
/instruct [give me some headline ideas for Best AI Writing Tool]
/instruct [give me some topic ideas for Best AI Writing Tool]
/instruct [create an outline for Best AI Writing Tool]
/instruct [write a conclusion to Best AI Writing Tool]

What I Don’t Like about ShortlyAI?

Not so Good for Marketing Copy

Although I absolutely love the command setup for helping me write blog posts and articles, I don’t really like how it works for writing marketing copy. For example, you will see below that I did an instruct command to ask the AI writer to write some ad copy for me. It works well, but it doesn’t feel as sleek and easy as the other tools.

For example, another tool I use is WriteSonic and, although this is not as good at writing blurbs and articles, it does give me a better result for marketing copy. Mainly because it has clear instructions for the different types of marketing copy and what you need to input to get good results.

You will see in the screenshot below what Writesonic asks for in order to write a Google Ad. By asking for structured data on what you want to promote, the copy is going to be much better in my opinion. It may be possible to do this in ShortlyAI but as you have to enter it in one string it quickly turns into a complex mess for these use cases. This is an area that ShortlyAI will hopefully work on in the future.

So Should You Subscribe to ShortlyAI?

For me, I would say that ShortlyAI is by far the best AI writing tool on the market right now if you are after blog or article style content. I just love the smooth integration of the AI as I type myself, and it allows me to be much more productive without relying on the AI too much (which would cause more errors I then have to go back and correct!). It also works very well using the instruct command to generate topic ideas for blog posts and even post outlines.

And to think that I can get unlimited text generation for $25 a month (as I have an annual plan) in ShortlyAI is just crazy value to me. Most other tools are at least double the price for similar features (or the good ones are, anyway!).

However, if you are looking for something to write your marketing copy (such as Facebook ads and Landing Page headlines), I would personally go for an AI tool more along the lines of WriteSonic. The more prescriptive style is much better suited to this use case, in my opinion.

I like ShortlyAI a lot and can see myself using it for a long time to come. If you want to check it out for yourself you can use the button below to visit the official website and see the finer details for yourself. As I stated earlier, they have a free trial so you can test it out in full.