How does Writefull’s Ask AI compare to ChatGPT for research-focused writing? Both tools bring strengths to the table: ChatGPT offers versatility, while Ask AI is fine-tuned to meet the demands of academic writing. In this post, we’ll share the results of a direct comparison, highlighting where Ask AI stands out in areas like methodology, research rigor, and tailored academic support. Dive in to explore the differences!

What is Ask AI?

Ask AI is Writefull’s built-in writing assistant for Word, designed to support academic writing. It can help with a range of tasks—from reviewing your text to explaining concepts and checking references. Since it works directly within Word, you can select any part of your document and ask questions about it without switching tabs. It provides context-aware answers that consider the surrounding text in your document, and that are tailored to research. Seamlessly integrated with Writefull’s language feedback and other writing tools, it makes a convenient and research-focused AI assistant. (Note: Writefull offers a separate AI assistant for Overleaf called TeXGPT, which helps with LaTeX writing.)

Is Writefull’s Ask AI assistant better for research than ChatGPT?

To compare the performance of Writefull’s Ask AI and ChatGPT for research, we entered eight research-related questions into Writefull’s Ask AI and ChatGPT and looked at the responses. The questions were about doing research, using methods, and improving text. Find a summary below this post, and the full document with the used texts and responses here.

In six out of eight questions, we saw that:

  • Writefull’s Ask AI showed a stronger focus on academic rigor, going deeper into methodology, ethical considerations, transparency, and replicability.
  • Writefull’s Ask AI demonstrated a deeper awareness of research contributions by encouraging hypothesis generation, theory advancement, and study implications.
  • While ChatGPT also gave valuable research advice, it generally focused more on language, readability, and practical improvements.

Interestingly, performance seemed related to the type of question asked:

  • In two cases (questions 4 and 5, about methods), ChatGPT and Writefull’s Ask AI performed equally well. These were the questions that indicated a strong research focus in their topic and wording. This suggests that ChatGPT’s responses become more suitable to academic writing when the question and its wording is academic.
  • In the more generic questions about doing research (questions 1-3: ‘What makes a good questionnaire / analysis?’, ‘What are case studies?’), ChatGPT’s advice was more general and less research-focused.
  • Similarly, in the three cases where we asked for text to be improved (questions 6-8: ‘How would you improve this Abstract / Conclusion / Research Objective?’), we saw that Writefull’s Ask AI focused mostly on how to make the content more solid from a research perspective (highlighting scientific evidence, emphasizing study importance, summarizing key findings), while ChatGPT was more concerned with language and readability.

These examples show that Writefull Ask AI’s tend to prioritize academic rigor and content more than ChatGPT does, even if the question does not imply a strong research focus. Combined with Writefull’s other features, like its research-tailored language edits and specialized writing widgets, such responses offer invaluable support for crafting research texts.

Getting started

Want to try Ask AI, along with Writefull’s language feedback, paraphraser, and other widgets? Download Writefull for Word to get started!


Summary of the Ask AI vs. ChatGPT comparison:

Question 1 - Doing research
What makes a good analysis?

Writefull Ask AI gives highly tailored advice, listing elements that shouldn’t be overlooked in a research analysis  as they are key to transparency and reproducibility. For instance, it mentions the importance of:

  • Clearly stating your objectives or research questions
  • Relating the analysis to a strong literature review
  • Transparent methods that should strive for reproducibility
  • Reliable data with systematic and objective analysis, avoiding biases
  • The acknowledgement of the study’s limitations
  • Ethical considerations, like citing sources and following ethical guidelines

The more generic ChatGPT gives advice applicable to a broad audience. It focuses on clarity, structure, and actionability. While these are useful for other types of analyses, they don’t suffice to meet academic research standards.

Question 2 - Doing research
What are case studies and why are they useful?

Writefull’s Ask AI explains case studies as a research method, and lists how this method serves current and future research. It explains how case studies can help academic inquiry through:

  • Hypothesis generation - they help generate questions for future research
  • Theory development - they can support or challenge existing theories

It emphasizes how case studies help ‘the advancement of theory’.

In contrast, while ChatGPT mentions researchers and students, its response does not go into research-focused contributions. It focuses more on the practical applications and general benefits, like ‘critical thinking’ and ‘problem-solving’.

Question 3 - Doing research
What makes a good questionnaire?

Writefull’s Ask AI approaches the questionnaire from a researcher’s perspective by mentioning the research goal ('Clearly define the objective of the research’), and research topic (‘Ensure each question is relevant to the research topic’). ChatGPT does not have this focus.

Both the Writefull and ChatGPT also include broader advice, like question order, simple language, and avoiding bias.

Question 4 - Methods
What are the main methodological differences between a randomized controlled trial and a quasi-experimental design in education research?

In this case, we see GPT aligns more closely with Writefull. Both go into research-relevant details like randomization and reducing bias. Writefull does give slightly more detail on ethical concerns than GPT does.

GPT likely aligns more with Writefull in this response because of the scientific focus and terminology fed by the question. This indicates we’re asking for a research perspective more clearly than questions that use simpler language and that aren’t necessarily about research, like  ‘What are case studies?’.

Question 5 - Methods
What are the most effective data visualization techniques for representing longitudinal survey data in social sciences?

Similar to question 4, we see that the responses of ChatGPT and Writefull’s Ask AI are quite similar. Both list various techniques and how these can be used for different use cases in social science research. ChatGPT’s response is slightly more informative, as it refers to types of datasets or to tools that can be used.

Question 6 - Revising text
How would you improve this abstract? Please give me bullet points of the things to change, and why.

When asked to improve an abstract, we see a clear difference between the responses of ChatGPT and Writefull’s Ask AI. ChatGPT focuses on enhancing the overall structure, flow, and language (informal and vague wording, ungrammatical phrases, capitalization). In terms of the content, it includes many of the points that Writefull’s Ask AI covers, like clarifying the research aim, specifying the methods used, and including quantitative findings. Writefull’s Ask AI adds to this by advising the use of scientific technology and encouraging to emphasize what’s unique or significant about the study–key to writing a scientific abstract.

Question 7 - Revising text
How would you improve this conclusion? Please give me bullet points of the things to change, and why.

The two responses again show a stronger focus on language by ChatGPT, and on research by Writefull’s Ask AI. Language revision makes up 5 out of 7 points by ChatGPT, versus 2 out of 5 by Ask AI.

ChatGPT doesn’t entirely skip content, however. It advises to strengthen the significance of the findings and to expand on future research directions, two points also mentioned by Writefull’s Ask AI. Ask AI additionally recommends to clearly summarize the key findings, to add a concluding opinion about the implications, and to follow the expected flow of first the findings, then implications, and then future research.

Question 8 - Revising text
How would you improve this Research Objective section? Please give me bullet points of the things to change, and why.

In terms of content, both ChatGPT and Writefull’s Ask AI recommend to explain the role of birds in the ecosystem and to mention specific studies or data. Writefull’s Ask AI elaborates more on this. While ChatGPT recommends to give more detail in order to ‘provide more context’ and ‘emphasize the importance’, Writefull’s Ask AI explains what could be specified and why (‘specific examples of how birds contribute to the ecosystem, such as specific species involved in seed dispersal or pollination, to provide concrete evidence of their ecological importance’, ‘examples or findings from recent studies showing how climate change affects bird physiology, migration patterns, or breeding success’, etc.). Writefull’s Ask AI also recommends mentioning current conversation efforts and long-term implications.

The advice given by Writefull’s Ask AI therefore helps more to ground the paragraph in scientific evidence and highlight the importance of the study–both important in a Research Objective section.