Show HN: Phraisely.com, look up words by their description

1 point

4 years ago

My writing process is a constant back and forth between jotting down a few words and a [insert] placeholder, as in the "I'll-complete-that-sentence-later-once-I-remember-the-correct-word" note.

So, I built phraisely. It is a reverse thesaurus: you input a detailed description, and the app returns its best guesses.

Compared to the existing solutions for this task, phraisely attempts to better understand the full context in your query, making it more accurate when looking up words using long descriptions.

For example, if I search for "being home at night watching Netflix on the couch", results can contain "relaxing" and "unwinding" but also "binge-watching" since I mentioned Netflix. Bonus points when I get some slang in the results (e.g. couch-potatoing).

The aim is to have an assistant that writes with you. But it doesn't do it for you. Overall, I believe that writing is a frustrating process. Frustration stimulates creativity. And creativity is precious.

It is the first functioning version of the app. I'm regularly reviewing the output's quality and am working on tailoring it better to user needs. Also, my long term plan would be introducing languages other than English in the results. Although, the app can already understand some input text from other common languages, like Spanish.