Byword AI Review
Overall, Byword is by far the best AI article generator I have reviewed in terms of ease of use, feature integration, and content quality. I appreciate its simplicity because it produces standout content. The downsides are minor quality-of-life issues that are easily overcome. I highly recommend giving Byword a try!
Pros
Great Quality
Clear Pricing Structure
Complimentary Features
Cons
Limited Text Editor
Expensive For Bulk Generation
Features At A Glance
- Primary Function: Article generation
- Text Editor: Yes
- Image Integration: Yes
- Bulk Generation: Yes
- WordPress Integration: Yes
- Keyword Integration: Yes
- SEO Optimization: No
- Prompt Templates: Limited
- Chatbot: No
- Browser Integration: No
Byword AI Review: AI Article Writing At Its Finest
Today I’m trying out Byword AI, which boasts to be “the most advanced AI article writer for producing content at scale”. With image generation tailored to the article, SEO optimization, WordPress integration, and content powered by GPT-4, I’m excited to see how it works out. Let’s go!
AI-powered Content Strategy
I noticed an interesting option on the landing page before I signed up for a free trial, “AI-powered content strategy.” I dropped the domain name in and pressed scan to get a list of “programmatic content ideas”. It produced a list of keywords relevant to my site and asked me to select one for ideas. I selected “AI Writing”. The result was not what I was expecting, which was perhaps a list of article titles.
Instead, it produced a short list of variable keyword structures, with options to fill in the variables. I selected one of the structures, and it produced 10 variables for each value… a total of 100 article ideas, instantly.
Three of the five keyword structures were “how to” keywords, so not helpful for my site as I write reviews and informational articles. When I do get to writing how-to guides on specific tools though, this will be the first place I check out! I tried again with the keyword “Unbiased Reviews”. The results were much more relevant to my website today. For those who need help with content strategy or content ideas, this is a very powerful and useful tool.
User Experience
With that fun little experiment done, I decided to try the more traditional article generation approaches. The dashboard for article generation was very simple. I had three generation modes for single article generation: Keyword, Title, or Title & Subtitles. Having these different modes for article generation allows the tool to be adaptable to your workflow and content strategy. Additionally, there’s a nifty “learn” link that produces a small information popup that helps explain my choices.
There’s also an entire knowledge base to help you understand how to use their tools properly. The knowledge articles were simple and effective, and covered all aspects of the product. My only critique here would be the lack of a dark mode, which in my opinion should be a mandatory feature for all websites!
Features
In addition to single article generation, there is also a batch generator option, and a “custom formats” option. The custom formats include the programmatic builder that I played with above, a glossary builder, and “write from URL” which is described as “generates articles by scraping lists of your competitors’ URLs”. I don’t want to piggyback off other people’s content, so I’m skipping that one for now, but I can see myself using the glossary builder and the programmatic builder down the line.
To note, the “List-Based Articles” custom format was added during the two week period that I wrote and edited this article. They really do listen to feedback, as that was the format I had requested previously!
It also has integrations with popular sites like WordPress and Zapier, along with Google Search Console indexing and integration, and an ability to request other integrations. It’s apparent that the development team has a laser focus on creating a smooth, all-inclusive platform for long-form content generation in the content creator space.
Keyword Research and SEO Features
There is also a research tool, which is used for keyword research and SEO. It provides very basic keyword functionality, but all of the basic functionality one needs for SEO and freelance writing. Essentially, you can give it a keyword and it will generate similar keywords, making it a useful tool for bloggers and content writers. Or you can give it a website and it will give you keyword ideas based on the website’s content and performance.
You can then create your own keyword list from those ideas, with difficulty ratings and keyword volume included, helping you optimize your content for search engines. But here’s the coolest part… you can then just send those keywords over to the batch generator and generate a whole lot of articles without fuss. I don’t have enough credits in a free trial (5) to give that a real try, but if it works as advertised, that’s mighty useful.
Keyword reports are limited though, and cannot be added on a per report basis like articles can. This means if you want to use this function, you’ll have to pay for a subscription.
Images and Settings
Finally, there is an article settings option, which gives you basic options to pre-select so you don’t have to select them for every article generation. There are also image settings here, which is pretty cool. I can select up to 4 images per article, and choose between either Stable Diffusion XL January 2023 or August 2023 models. Byword will create those images and insert them as part of the article creation process, to include the featured image.
Byword’s documentation states that this tool is a custom image model that it considered a free add-on to the article tool, which earns it major brownie points in my eyes, since most tools charge a lot for quality image generation. The images it created were stylized and clean, with relevant imagery for the article.
Article Generator Results
There are a few more features, such as custom CTAs and website interlinking, but I’m antsy to start generating content so I’ll save those for later. I started with generating by keyword, “ai story generator”. The result is impressive. It produced an 1800-word article describing storytelling Ais. The content is well written, but though I selected “casual” for tone, it reads more like a high school essay.
That’s not necessarily bad, it is just too clean for my tastes. There are custom tone options though, so I bet with a bit of refining this tool would really shine. Further, the images are excellent and well-placed, the headings are relevant, and there is good content for each section. Overall, it is a well-formatted, well-written article that only needs a little help to sound human.
While I didn’t publish that article, I did publish one it wrote about AI writing tools. See that example here: How Do AI Writing Tools Work?
Next, I tried generating an article by title. “The 5 best AI story writers”. I changed the tone to conversational and added anti-AI detection to see if that helped the overall tone sound more human. Since it gave me 3 AI story writers in the last article, I didn’t think it would struggle to find two more to talk about.
Unfortunately, the first article it produced didn’t figure that out and just gave me a boilerplate text to insert my own recommendations into. The images were also… interesting… for this one. There was one that gave me 1982 dystopian vibes, and another that had robots with funky arms that made me laugh. The tone was more on point for what I was looking for, so kudos for that! I used the option to regenerate to see if it could do better.
Unfortunately again, it got worse. It still didn’t come up with 5 tools to talk about, but provided boilerplate text for me to slip a tool name into. The images slid down in quality, being generic images of four or five robots in various collaborations.
Perhaps the biggest disapointment was that they only allow one “rewrite”, so my credit for this article is done. It appears that if you don’t like the content produced you get one redo, and that’s it. I would have to do a lot more testing with the tool to ensure it produces quality writing and images consistently before buying a subscription for this reason.
Pricing
Speaking of credits, it’s time to talk about pricing. Byword prices are based on “per article” measures, instead of “per word”, which makes figuring out the value per article really easy! They also allow payment for single-article production at $5 per article, a feature I haven’t seen with other sites. $5 per article is somewhat expensive, but still far cheaper than hiring a human writer. And buying in bulk lowers the price… a little.
25 articles for $4 will set you back $100, and that’s the lowest-priced subscription option. With a 20-article break-even point, I think the per-article price, which is a one-time payment and can be paid for individually or in bulk, becomes pretty attractive. Moreover, articles don’t expire, which is a huge boon as many subscription plans in this industry reset your credits every month.
Good quality, great images, SEO features, and proper structure? Add in the awesomely fair and transparent pricing policies, and I’m a fan, even if my pocketbook isn’t.
Byword Review: Conclusion
To be honest, the only real downside I see for this tool, other than the price, is that it doesn’t have a built-in full-featured text editor to fine-tune the article. The one it does have is akin to WordPad if you remember what that is. Good enough for changing a word or two, but not really built for heavy edits.
However, Byword’s interface is designed to remove clutter and distractions, allowing you to focus on your writing. Additionally, Byword supports the use of markdown language, making it a great tool for distraction-free writing and publishing directly to popular websites.
Overall, Byword is by far the best AI article generator I have reviewed in terms of ease of use, feature integration, and content quality. I appreciate its simplicity because it produces standout content. The tool is obviously still in development as well, with more features coming soon. I’m not sure why other Byword reviews aren’t as impressed because this is a very good AI writing app, especially compared to other AI writing tools such as Article Forge and HypotenuseAI. If you’re in the market for a very powerful content writer, give Byword a spin!
