Shodo
4.4
Shodo is AI proofreading built specifically for Japanese — not spell-checking ported from English, but the things that actually go wrong in Japanese business writing: inconsistent notation, honorific errors, ambiguous modifiers, doubled particles. It runs in Word, Chrome, Google Docs and over PDFs.
- Commercial use OK
- Japanese UI
- Free tier
- Enterprise contract
- Pricing
- ¥1,000/mo
- Free tier
- Free tier
- Commercial use
- Permitted
- Japanese UI
- Yes
- Enterprise contract
- Available
What it is good for
- Japanese documents that go outside the company
- Teams needing consistent notation across many writers
- Catching honorific errors before a client does
- Proofreading PDFs that cannot be edited
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Tuned for Japanese rather than adapted from English
- Works inside Word, Chrome, Google Docs and on PDFs
- Enforces a shared notation dictionary across a team
- Free tier to evaluate on real documents
Trade-offs
- Only relevant if you publish in Japanese
- Style suggestions need judgement; not everything flagged is wrong
- Does not check facts, only language
Editors' review
Proofreading that knows what goes wrong in Japanese specifically
General-purpose models write good Japanese but are unreliable proofreaders of it: they rewrite rather than flag, and they miss the categories that matter commercially — notation drift across a document, honorifics that are subtly wrong, modifiers that attach to the wrong noun.
The shared dictionary is the feature teams keep. Agreeing once how a product name is written, and having that enforced across every writer, removes an argument that otherwise recurs forever.
It checks language, not truth. A document can pass cleanly and still say something false. And outside Japanese-language publishing there is no reason to buy it.
Verdict
The right tool if you publish in Japanese and consistency matters. Irrelevant otherwise.
Compiled from official documentation and public sources, with our own editorial judgement. We do not publish figures we cannot source.