I built a Paraphrasing Tool that can rewrite text and made it opensource

Important links referenced in this post

1. The source code for this project is here
2. QuillBot you can find here
3. Paraphrasing Tool on RapidAPI you can find here

Are you a student with an assignment due tomorrow but you’ve been too busy drinking and partying to actually write it? Or maybe you’re a writer and you make money from creating unique content online but you don’t actually want to put in the time or work to create your own content? no worries, just find a paper you like and let AI rewrite it for you…

Okay besides that being unethical and in some cases illegal, it definitely won’t help your learning and self-development, but who am I to judge you.

In all seriousness, I only condone the use of this tool for learning and definitely not for plagiarizing content that authors like myself spend a lot of time writing.

This project will automatically correct grammatical errors and paraphrase where possible while attempting to maintain the logic of a sentence by taking the context of each word into consideration.

The Goal

The goal of this post is to demonstrate how you can use a paraphrasing tool I built to rewrite as much text as you want. Maybe you can learn from it, add to it, create something even better, and monetize it.

Prerequisites

1. Node.js installed locally on your machine. You can get it here.
2. Ability to follow the simple instructions that open and run the project locally.

Install

Head over to my GitHub here and download (Clone if you’re techie) the repository onto your local machine. Once you’ve done that navigate into the project and install the dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/HealthyTechGuy/paraphrasingTool.git

cd paraphrasing-tool

npm i

I built this simple React app in a few hours, the actual text spinning magic happens behind the scenes via an API call to a service on RapidAPI which I also developed.

Get your API key

I have set up this application to use the Paraphrasing Tool on Rapid API, however, you could change this to use any paraphrasing API that you wish with some minor code changes.

Head over to the RapidAPI Paraphrasing Tool here and subscribe to a plan to get the API key which you’ll need for the next step.

In the config.json file, you’ll see the following key-value pair.

"paraphrasingToolRapidAPIKey": "YOUR-KEY-HERE"

You guessed it! replace “YOUR-KEY-HERE” with the API key you just got from RapidAPI.

Run the project

Ensuring you’re inside the project directory, run npm start

you can then navigate to “http://localhost:3000” and you should be able to see the UI as shown below.

Let’s see what it can do

I experimented with a number of different sentences and paragraphs to test how effective the tool is and evaluate if the output makes sense.

Let's copy some text I found online:

“NutriHealth co-founders are Mark Clifford and Paula Gaynor. They initially focused on the Irish market and their products are now available online and in more than 70 outlets across the country”

and paste it into our paraphrasing tool:

Immediately we can notice three things that have happened here:

1. The position of some words has changed
2. Some new words have been inserted
3. Some existing words have been changed to fit the new context

For example, the words: “co-founders are” have been changed to “is co-founded by” and the word “nationwide” has been changed to “across the country”.

what about if we insert incorrect grammar?

Let's try changing “their” to “there” and see how it handles it.

We can see that Grammarly noticed the change I made by underlining it with red, however, after clicking rewrite that change has been fixed. A comma, and the word “where” have been inserted to ensure the output makes sense.

Final thoughts

This application is an affordable, fast, and easy to use paraphrasing tool that can manipulate large bodies of text and fix grammatical mistakes while removing plagiarism effectively.

However, if you’re looking for more control over how your text is changed then QuillBot offers a variety of options such as:

It’s worth noting that some options such as increasing the number of synonyms in a sentence or using “creativity mode” can make the QuillBot tool less accurate so I’d recommend experimenting until you find a setting that suits your needs.

Congratulations, you now have a paraphrasing tool that can be used for rewriting any body of text you’d like. I hope you found this useful, feel free to contribute to the open-source project on my GitHub or get in touch with me here.