Are Natural Language Processing transformer networks all the rage for helping you write? Maybe, but not for the reasons you might think. They're not just some technology -driven thing. In fact, many of the problems they're designed to address actually have very little to do with technological advances at all. The efficacy of this type of NLP technology is directly related to how much information it's able to extract from a given stimulus. The more information it's able to extract, the better the results. So is using a neural network to help you write worth it? Let's explore how this might work in practice. Using the blog post use case we could take a neural network trained on text to make inferences about the content of a document or we could use that network to generate multiple sentences based on the text we've fed it. This ability to generate text is important to consider because we want to create the best results possible while still creating something that is uniquely our own. Could this process help us by saving time and effort? Yes. But first we need to determine how to measure effectiveness of such an approach. Using an algorithm to complete our sentences is not new. Autocomplete has been destroying our text messages for years. So what makes this approach different? Simply put , neural networks can help us to complete a sentence much faster by leveraging their ability to extract meaning from text. This ability to seamlessly complete sentences is key to being able to achieve greater usefulness in our work. In practice, the ability to complete a sentence means we can focus on what matters vs. spending time on the details of our sentences. So far, I can't really say if my writing is faster because of this ability or if it's just easier. In some ways writing like this feels like having an automatic tool for my writing that helps me focus on the big picture instead of focusing on small details that can be distracting to the message I am trying to convey. Or maybe writing like this feels like having an easy- to- use interface for writing that makes it easy to write concise , meaningful and interesting posts while still having some measure of control over the creative process. But the real question is why should we care about achieving better efficiency in writing when most people can write the same way as this minus the artificial intelligence. I think the answer lies in what this technology allows us to accomplish. Using tools such as this help us to become more productive at what we do by helping us to focus while also being a somewhat decent solution to the problem of writer's block. In fact, I suspect that this technology is a better solution than most of the tricks and tips I have tried before as it works really well at filling in the blanks when you are struggling with writing. But can it write the entire post for you? Let's see how it does with just a single paragraph. The first thing I noticed was how much easier it was to focus on the big picture rather than small details when using this tool. Even though the tool can write most of your entire post, it takes a bit more time for it to process what you have written and figure out what your main points are. If I were to write a short post on the power of using this technology and the benefits it has for productivity I would start by explaining the basic concepts and what this technology does. Not bad, right? So is the future of writing going to be more like this or something else? To be honest, I'm not sure. While this technology is amazing in how well it works for writing, it is definitely not perfect. It is far from being good enough to write whole posts without some human help and it is hard for any human to tell the difference when both human and machine are working together. So the human writers are safe for now