Shortlyai is a simple AI-powered text generator that was created to help content creators come up with long-form blog posts and fiction stories at the push of a button.
When Shortlyai came into the scene in 2020 it was considered revolutionary, but since then it’s been surpassed in scope and functionality by many other players.
In 2021 Shortlyai was acquired by Jasper, a leading AI writing assistant, although it’s still available as a stand-alone product to this day.
In this article we’ll review Shortlyai’s features, its pros and cons, its interface, its pricing, as well as Shortlyai alternatives for you to consider.
Disclosure: Although I receive affiliate compensation at no additional cost to you to support this site that compensation in no way influences my recommendations, which are strictly informed by my 10+ years of online business experience consulting for clients large and small. My aim is to always recommend tools that offer the best return for your investment (for more details, read my Affiliate Disclosure).
First, The Bottom Line
Shortlyai Pros
- Intuitive to use--no learning curve
- Very basic inputs required (e.g. title and brief for blog posts)
- Long-form content creation
- 4 commands to enhance the content creation process (Instruct, Rewrite, Shorten, and Expand)
- Unlimited content generation (no metering in all plans)
Shortlyai Cons
- Only supports blog-post and story content generation out of the box. Other content modes are possible through its Instruct command, but the process is very obscure
- The quality of the output can be hit and miss
- It’s more expensive than competitors that offer a lot more functionality
How Does Shortlyai Work?
Shortlyai uses a neural network run by a text generation algorithm called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) to predict the next word that should follow a seed phrase that users provide.
This neural network has been trained with vast amounts of content from the internet and it’s programmed to optimize 175 billion different parameters during training.
The result is human-like writing that can be applied to long-form blog posts and stories.
Who Is Shortlyai Good For?
Shortlyai is perfect for bloggers and content managers who want to accelerate the publication of new content without the need to hire more writers.
While Shortlyai doesn’t replace writers per se, what it does is to allow them to cut down the time it takes to create long-form articles--sometimes by half--allowing them to produce two articles in the same time it takes to create one without the use of AI.
User Interface
Shortlyai user interface is very simple, but also very limited. Here’s a screenshot of its welcome portal:
Let’s go through some examples to see what happens when you click the above buttons:
Blog Post Creation
Once you click Start writing Shortlyai will ask you to type a title, a content brief and a starting sentence.
For this example, I’ve entered the following information:
Article title: How Do You Create an Email Marketing Sequence?
Article brief: Write an article that explains the steps required to create an email sequence. Include best practices.
Starter sentence: Email marketing has one of the highest conversion rates in the…
And here is the output after clicking the Write for me button:
To generate more email marketing sequencing steps, you’d have to repeatedly click the Write for me button until you get what you need in order to complete your article.
Story Creation
Now, let’s test Shortlyai’s story creation process. We’re going to click Start writing, on the right hand side now, and enter a title, some story background information and a starting sentence.
For this example, I’ve entered the following information:
Story title: The Crime of the Century
Story background: Peter Holmes, the protagonist, is being hunted by James Dexter, the antagonist, because Peter had discovered his secret plan to intercept a large shipment of diamonds in the Antwerp diamond district destined for large jewelry stores in London.
Starter sentence: Peter was hiding in the attic when he heard…
And here’s the new output after clicking the Write for me button:
Once again, in order to build on this story, you’d need to repeatedly click the Write for me button until you get your desired content.
Commands
Now, in addition to the above two content creation options Shortlyai has a set of four commands you can use to enhance your AI-assisted content generation, as outlined below.
Instruct
The Instruct command allows you to provide Shortlyai specific directions, such as “Write the opening sentence for a cold email offering digital marketing services”.
While this command technically enhances the use cases that Shortlyai provides beyond writing blog posts and stories, it’s not very well documented, so it’s a bit hard to use.
Rewrite
The rewrite command takes your textual input and rewrites in a unique way.
While this can be useful if you want to spin content, it’s quite limited in scope as it only allows your input to have a maximum of 160 characters.
Shorten
Shorten allows you to condense your initial text into a shorter sentence. Again, while useful in principle, it limits you to just 200 characters.
Expand
The Expand command may be a bit more useful, as it allows you to take your input text (up to a maximum of 120 characters) and re-develop it into a longer sentence.
Plans & Pricing
Shortlyai has a single unmetered plan, with an annual payment option and a monthly option:
Annual Plan
The Annual plan costs $65 per month when paid annually (or $780 on sign up) and it includes all features plus system updates throughout the year.
Monthly Plan
The Monthly plan costs $79 per month and also includes all features plus system updates during the month.
Shortlyai Alternatives
Is Shortlyai AI the only game in town? Far from it!
Below are some of the most popular Shortlyai competitors:
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Shortlyai offer a free trial?
Yes, but it’s super-limited. By signing up to their free trial, you’re only allowed to generate text a grand total of four times before you get locked out.
Unfortunately, this is not generous enough to be able to see if the tool can meet your needs.
Is there a limit to the number of words I can write?
The plus side of ShortlyAI is that it’s unmetered--so you can generate as many words as you need without incurring in extra charges (most of its competitors are metered.)
Does it support multiple languages?
No, ShortlyAI only works in English at present.
In Conclusion
I think ShortlyAI has already had its moment in the sun and, while very impressive when it first came into the scene a few years ago, it has fallen behind as a stand alone tool, plus it’s way too expensive for the limited features it offers.
Since jasper’s acquisition, it also looks like tool development on Shortlyai has ground to a halt.
Having said that, you may still want to try it out for a month to see if it can work for you, and if it does and you want to generate a large amount of content, you may be able to benefit from the unmetered word count.
Otherwise, you’ll probably do better with other alternatives.
