HyperWrite powers its generative AI service with Cohere

Overview

Today, the blank page is a thing of the past. Generative AI startups are building new and innovative ways to help writers of all kinds create the content they need to achieve their goals. One such pioneer is HyperWrite, a generative AI-powered writing assistant for consumers that makes the process easy and fast.

HyperWrite adds autocomplete capabilities to websites and apps, providing users with ideas and suggestions as they type. HyperWrite also enables users to enter prompts and generate complete copy for longer pieces, such as emails, blog posts, business memos, and more.

When choosing an LLM for their TypeAhead feature, the HyperWrite team considered several commercial and open-source solutions, as well as building their own. In the end, they chose Cohere’s generative LLM due to its high quality, low latency, and affordability.

LLM: Hosted, self-built, or open source?

To deliver the best possible writing assistant, the startup wanted to build an interface that enabled the average person to interact with, and get value from, large language models (LLMs).

The team considered a variety of approaches to integrating LLMs into the HyperWrite platform, including building their own models from scratch or customizing an open-source solution. Matt Shumer, CEO and Co-Founder, says, “There are so many options out there, but at the end of the day, our first priority is our customers. By working with a managed solution like Cohere, we're able to focus our entire effort on our customers — understanding what they need, and building and iterating that for them.”

The company tried working with a few managed generative AI solutions before finally settling on Cohere for the long term. The deciding factors: accuracy, affordability, and great support. Shumer says, “Cohere’s models are amazing. The company excels at delivering cost-effective, low-latency, medium-sized models that are high-quality, which enables us to build some of our most difficult-to-implement features that can deliver excellent performance.”

10x more, 10x faster with Cohere

HyperWrite is using Cohere’s Command-Light model, which is a great fit for their product. It provides the perfect balance between speed and accuracy, enabling users to generate the output they expected within seconds, whether in the planning, drafting, editing, or iterating process with their piece. When it comes to mitigating risk, Shumer is confident with his team’s approach. “Safety is a reasonable concern, but today’s LLMs have come a long way. Two years ago, you had no clue about what might come out of a model. Now, you have a good sense of how the model will behave.” HyperWrite also uses filtering technology built for social media, adding multiple layers of filters on top of their outputs. Text is not shown to the user until it’s checked, approved, and cleared.

So far, Shumer and team have seen very few problems, even with hundreds of thousands of monthly users. He said, “A lot of companies become too risk averse because they don’t realize that it’s possible to constrain things. Our approach has worked well for us and it’s also been easy to implement.”

During development, the Cohere team provided valuable technical support that helped the HyperWrite team achieve their goals. When they experienced problems or needed help figuring out a use case, Cohere expertise was right there for them. “That’s a superpower,” said Shumer. “Having Cohere’s team as an extension of ours enables us to do 10 times more, 10 times faster. They’re responsive over Slack, and always willing to try to push through boundaries for us.”

High-quality, affordable generative AI

HyperWrite is currently in hyper-growth mode, and the pace has been remarkable. “We’re actually outpacing our previous growth percentages and doubling our business every two months,” said Shumer. “And week after week, Cohere enables us to continue delivering at this ever-increasing scale, both from a platform and support perspective. We've worked with a number of vendors, and there's a clear difference in the quality of Cohere’s support, their ability to assist us and help us grow.”

By removing the challenges of building their own solution, Cohere enables the startup to do more of what they do best and not worry about things outside of that. “Our entire business is language AI-first,” said Shumer. “It’s one of the most important functions we have to get right. It’s also quite complex and difficult to do, so managed solutions like Cohere help us implement language AI at a reasonable cost and with high quality.”

Watch our full interview with Matt Shumer to hear more of the HyperWrite story.