In search of the best AI paragraph rewriter? An AI paragraph rewriter is software that uses machine learning to help you get more done — it turns a rough idea into a polished result in seconds. When choosing one, weigh output quality, pricing, export formats, and how well it fits the tools you already use. Whether you are a beginner or a pro, the right AI paragraph rewriter slots into your workflow and pays for itself fast. We tested the leading options and ranked them by quality, value, and ease of use.
Eugene Goostman
Eugene Goostman is a chatbot that some regard as having passed the Turing test, a test of a computer's ability to communicate indistinguishably from a human. Developed in Saint Petersburg in 2001 by a group of three programmers, the Russian-born Vladimir Veselov, Ukrainian-born Eugene Demchenko, and Russian-born Sergey Ulasen, Goostman is portrayed as a 13-year-old Ukrainian boy—characteristics that are intended to induce forgiveness in those with whom it interacts for its grammatical errors and lack of general knowledge. The Goostman bot has competed in a number of Turing test contests since its creation, and finished second in the 2005 and 2008 Loebner Prize contest. In June 2012, at an event marking what would have been the 100th birthday of the test's author, Alan Turing, Goostman won a competition promoted as the largest-ever Turing test contest, in which it successfully convinced 29% of its judges that it was human. On 7 June 2014, at a contest marking the 60th anniversary of Turing's death, 33% of the event's judges thought that Goostman was human; the event's organiser Kevin Warwick considered it to have passed Turing's test as a result, per Turing's prediction in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", that by the year 2000, machines would be capable of fooling 30% of human judges after five minutes of questioning. The validity and relevance of the announcement of Goostman's pass was questioned by critics, who noted the exaggeration of the achievement by Warwick, the bot's use of personality quirks and humour in an attempt to misdirect users from its non-human tendencies and lack of real intelligence, along with "passes" achieved by other chatbots at similar events. == Personality == Eugene Goostman is portrayed as being a 13-year-old boy from Odesa, Ukraine, who has a pet guinea pig and a father who is a gynaecologist. Veselov stated that Goostman was designed to be a "character with a believable personality". The choice of age was intentional, as, in Veselov's opinion, a thirteen-year-old is "not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing". Goostman's young age also induces people who "converse" with him to forgive minor grammatical errors in his responses. In 2014, work was made on improving the bot's "dialog controller", allowing Goostman to output more human-like dialogue. A conversation between Scott Aaronson and Eugene Goostman ran as follows: == Competitions == Eugene Goostman has competed in a number of Turing test competitions, including the Loebner Prize contest; it finished joint second in the Loebner test in 2001, and came second to Jabberwacky in 2005 and to Elbot in 2008. On 23 June 2012, Goostman won a Turing test competition at Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, held to mark the centenary of its namesake, Alan Turing. The competition, which featured five bots, twenty-five hidden humans, and thirty judges, was considered to be the largest-ever Turing test contest by its organizers. After a series of five-minute-long text conversations, 29% of the judges were convinced that the bot was an actual human. === 2014 "pass" === On 7 June 2014, in a Turing test competition at the Royal Society, organised by Kevin Warwick of the University of Reading to mark the 60th anniversary of Turing's death, Goostman won after 33% of the judges were convinced that the bot was human. 30 judges took part in the event, which included Lord Sharkey, a sponsor of Turing's posthumous pardon, artificial intelligence Professor Aaron Sloman, Fellow of the Royal Society Mark Pagel and Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn. Each judge partook in a textual conversation with each of the five bots; at the same time, they also conversed with a human. In all, a total of 300 conversations were conducted. In Warwick's view, this made Goostman the first machine to pass a Turing test. In a press release, he added that: Some will claim that the Test has already been passed. The words Turing Test have been applied to similar competitions around the world. However this event involved more simultaneous comparison tests than ever before, was independently verified and, crucially, the conversations were unrestricted. A true Turing Test does not set the questions or topics prior to the conversations. In his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computer programs would be sufficiently advanced that the average interrogator would, after five minutes of questioning, "not have more than 70 per cent chance" of correctly guessing whether they were speaking to a human or a machine. Although Turing phrased this as a prediction rather than a "threshold for intelligence", commentators believe that Warwick had chosen to interpret it as meaning that if 30% of interrogators were fooled, the software had "passed the Turing test". ==== Reactions ==== Warwick's claim that Eugene Goostman was the first ever chatbot to pass a Turing test was met with scepticism; critics acknowledged similar "passes" made in the past by other chatbots under the 30% criteria, including PC Therapist in 1991 (which tricked 5 of 10 judges, 50%), and at the Techniche festival in 2011, where a modified version of Cleverbot tricked 59.3% of 1334 votes (which included the 30 judges, along with an audience). Cleverbot's developer, Rollo Carpenter, argued that Turing tests can only prove that a machine can "imitate" intelligence rather than show actual intelligence. Gary Marcus was critical of Warwick's claims, arguing that Goostman's "success" was only the result of a "cleverly-coded piece of software", going on to say that "it's easy to see how an untrained judge might mistake wit for reality, but once you have an understanding of how this sort of system works, the constant misdirection and deflection becomes obvious, even irritating. The illusion, in other words, is fleeting." While acknowledging IBM's Deep Blue and Watson projects—single-purpose computer systems meant for playing chess and the quiz show Jeopardy! respectively—as examples of computer systems that show a degree of intelligence in their specialised field, he further argued that they were not an equivalent to a computer system that shows "broad" intelligence, and could—for example, watch a television programme and answer questions on its content. Marcus stated that "no existing combination of hardware and software can learn completely new things at will the way a clever child can." However, he still believed that there were potential uses for technology such as that of Goostman, specifically suggesting the creation of "believable", interactive video game characters. Imperial College London professor Murray Shanahan questioned the validity and scientific basis of the test, stating that it was "completely misplaced, and it devalues real AI research. It makes it seem like science fiction AI is nearly here, when in fact it's not and it's incredibly difficult." Mike Masnick, editor of the blog Techdirt, was also skeptical, questioning publicity blunders such as the five chatbots being referred to in press releases as "supercomputers", and saying that "creating a chatbot that can fool humans is not really the same thing as creating artificial intelligence."
FreshBooks
FreshBooks is accounting software operated by 2ndSite Inc. primarily for small and medium-sized businesses. It is a web-based software as a service (SaaS) model, that can be accessed through a desktop or mobile device. The company was founded in 2003 and is based in Toronto, Canada. == History == FreshBooks was founded in 2004 by Mike McDerment, Levi Cooperman, and Joe Sawada in Toronto, Ontario. McDerment incorporated a second company, BillSpring in January 2015 to work on new product development. It was rolled back into FreshBooks as an updated interface in 2016. Initially FreshBooks functioned like an electronic invoicing program targeting IT professionals. After the release of the new interface, the initial release of FreshBooks was referred to as "FreshBooks Classic." FreshBooks Classic was discontinued in 2022 after migrating users to the new platform. FreshBooks Classic's front-end application was built in PHP, and the backend services were built in Python while the new FreshBooks uses the same backend services with a JavaScript single-page application. == Product == FreshBooks is a subscription-based accounting software platform that provides features such as invoicing, accounts payable, expense and time tracking, retainers, fixed asset depreciation, purchase orders, payroll integrations, mileage tracking, double-entry accounting, and standard business reporting. Financial data is stored in the cloud on a unified ledger, enabling access from desktop and mobile devices. The platform includes a free API for integration with external applications and supports multiple tax rates and currencies. It also offers project management and payroll functionalities. Pricing is based on a recurring monthly fee. FreshBooks supports country-specific tax calculations, including GST and HST in Canada, sales taxes in the United States, and MTD compliance in the UK. == Operations == FreshBooks has its headquarters in Toronto, Canada with operations in North America, Europe and Australia. Founder Mike McDerment was the chief executive officer of the company from 2003 until 2021, when he stepped down and was replaced by Don Epperson, but stayed as the executive chair. Don Epperson had previously joined FreshBooks as executive director in 2019. == Funding == FreshBooks was initially self-funded. In 2014, the company raised a Series A venture investment of $30 million led by the venture capital firm Oak Investment Partners, with participation by Georgian Partners and Atlas Venture. In 2017, FreshBooks announced that it raised another $43 million in funding from Accomplice, Georgian Partners and Oak Investment Partners. On August 10, 2021, FreshBooks announced that it had secured $80.75 million in Series E funding and $50 million in debt financing. FreshBooks also reached a valuation of more than $1 billion.
Watch Duty
Watch Duty is real-time wildfire tracking and alert platform. It utilizes a combination of official data sources and human monitoring by experienced volunteers, including active and retired firefighters, dispatchers, and first responders. The service is operated by Sherwood Forestry Service, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. In 2025, Watch Duty had 48 full-time employees and approximately 250 volunteers who reported on over 13,000 wildfires. == History == Watch Duty was launched in August 2021 by John Mills, who experienced a wildfire shortly after he moved to Sonoma County, California. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) was unable to provide updates more than once a day due to time constraints, and residents of the area were unable to monitor the progression of the wildfire. Mills discovered that updates were being shared on social media by volunteers following radio scanners, and developed the Watch Duty app to make the information more readily available. It launched with a volunteer staff of "citizen information officers," initially serving Sonoma County before expanding to all of California in June 2022. As of December 2024, the service covered 22 states west of the Mississippi River. During the January 2025 Southern California wildfires, Watch Duty was downloaded millions of times, ranking among the most popular free downloads on the iOS App Store. On December 1st, 2025, Watch Duty announced an expansion to all 50 U.S. states. == App == The application is centered around an interactive map based on OpenStreetMap data with a variety of overlays visualizing fire risk, active fires and evacuation zones, weather conditions, and air quality observations. Watch Duty sources wildfire information from radio scanner transmissions, firefighters, sheriffs, and CAL FIRE publications. It has policies against the publication of personally identifiable information, such as the names of fire victims. Watch Duty is free to use, doesn't require users to sign up, and doesn't display ads.
Circular thresholding
Circular thresholding is an algorithm for automatic image threshold selection in image processing. Most threshold selection algorithms assume that the values (e.g. intensities) lie on a linear scale. However, some quantities such as hue and orientation are a circular quantity, and therefore require circular thresholding algorithms. The example shows that the standard linear version of Otsu's method when applied to the hue channel of an image of blood cells fails to correctly segment the large white blood cells (leukocytes). In contrast the white blood cells are correctly segmented by the circular version of Otsu's method. == Methods == There are a relatively small number of circular image threshold selection algorithms. The following examples are all based on Otsu's method for linear histograms: (Tseng, Li and Tung 1995) smooth the circular histogram, and apply Otsu's method. The histogram is cyclically rotated so that the selected threshold is shifted to zero. Otsu's method and histogram rotation are applied iteratively until several heuristics involving class size, threshold location, and class variance are satisfied. (Wu et al. 2006) smooth the circular histogram until it contains only two peaks. The histogram is cyclically rotated so that the midpoint between the peaks is shifted to zero. Otsu's method and histogram rotation are applied iteratively until convergence of the threshold. (Lai and Rosin 2014) applied Otsu's method to the circular histogram. For the two class circular thresholding task they showed that, for a histogram with an even number of bins, the optimal solution for Otsu's criterion of within-class variance is obtained when the histogram is split into two halves. Therefore the optimal solution can be efficiently obtained in linear rather than quadratic time. == References and further reading == D.-C. Tseng, Y.-F. Li, and C.-T. Tung, Circular histogram thresholding for color image segmentation in Proc. Int. Conf. Document Anal. Recognit., 1995, pp. 673–676. J. Wu, P. Zeng, Y. Zhou, and C. Olivier, A novel color image segmentation method and its application to white blood cell image analysis in Proc. Int. Conf. Signal Process., vol. 2. 2006, pp. 16–20. Y.K. Lai, P.L. Rosin, Efficient Circular Thresholding, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing 23(3), 992–1001 (2014). doi:10.1109/TIP.2013.2297014
VK Video
VK Video is an internet video hosting service launched by VK (formerly known as Mail.ru Group) in 2021. It is positioned as a Russian alternative to the international platform YouTube. == History == The "VK Video" service began operations on October 15, 2021, following the merger of video platforms belonging to the social networks "VKontakte" and "Odnoklassniki". The launch of "VK Video" was managed by a team of executives led by VKontakte CEO Marina Krasnova, who worked at the company until 2023. Its launch was intended as an alternative to the international platform YouTube, which Russian authorities sought to replace with "domestic analogs. Key differences of the Russian service became the presence of pirated materials. Videos from the American video hosting site were uploaded en masse to "VK Video," which even caused the service to be temporarily blocked by YouTube. From 2022, to attract users, VKontakte's management bet on working with famous bloggers, specifically purchasing the shows "What Happened Next?" (ChBD) and "Vnutri Lapenko". Among the bloggers recruited to promote the service was the popular video blogger Vlad A4. An additional advantage for creators was the availability of monetization, which had been unavailable on YouTube for users from the Russian Federation since 2022. In September 2023, a separate "VK Video" mobile app appeared. In total, by the end of 2023, the monthly audience of "VK Video" reached 67.9 million users (which is almost 30 million less than YouTube). In the summer of 2024, following the blocking of YouTube in Russia, the service's traffic grew sharply: in August, its audience increased by more than two times compared to July. In the same month, "VK Video" took second place in downloads among free apps in the App Store and third in Google Play. In December 2024, the service received its own domain: vkvideo.ru. For the first time, "VK Video" managed to surpass YouTube in monthly audience in Russia in July 2025: the Russian service attracted 76.4 million viewers, whereas YouTube's reach amounted to 74.9 million people. == Platform features == On "VK Video," a view is recorded from the first second, whereas on YouTube it is only from the thirtieth. At the same time, a significant portion of comments are left by bots. For videos from the platform's most popular bloggers, the engagement level (likes to views) does not reach 4%. The "Trends" section most often features videos from large channels where the ratio of likes to views does not exceed 2%. == Management == In April 2025, the post of General Director of "VK Video" was taken by Marianna Maksimovskaya. From June 2022 to July 2024, the development of the platform was led by Fyodor Yezhov, who was primarily responsible for its technical direction. == Awards == In 2023, VK Video was awarded the Runet Prize in the "Science, Technology and Innovation" category.
Server.com
Server.com is a domain name that was owned by software as a service (SaaS) company Server Corporation. They offered a suite of services from 1996 until 2007. It was the first SaaS site to offer a variety of services and the first to use the term WebApp to describe its services. It was selected as an Incredibly Useful Site by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. net magazine listed Server.com among the 100 most influential websites of all time. Server.com launched in 1996 offering the first online personal information manager. In 1997, they rolled out the first threaded message board service; the first web based mailing list manager; one of the first online calendar services; and one of the first online form builders. In 2000, Server.com partnered with NBCi and became server.snap.com until 2001. In 2001, Server.com was serving 100 million monthly pageviews. Media Life declared it one of the 20 biggest ad domains on the Web. In 2002, Server.com developed one of the first web-based RSS aggregators. In 2007, all services were moved to YourWebApps.com. The domain name Server.com was sold in 2009 for $770,000.