Professor Stephen Bax came up with and started developing the idea of an automated tool which could help analyse texts linguistically while studying for a masters at Edinburgh University.

As a part of his research into Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) and his development of preliminary ideas for Text Inspector, Professor Stephen Bax wrote the influential article on ‘CALL – past, present and future’ which has been cited over 1400 times.

Professor Stephen Bax finally decided to put his work into practice, so he registered the domain name textinspector.com and officially founded Text Inspector.

With Text Inspector growing, Professor Bax decided he needed professional software developers, so he reached out to the professional software development team at Versantus who we have been working with ever since.

Text Inspector won the prestigious British Council ELTons award for Digital Innovation.

Unfortunately, Professor Bax passed away, and his two sons took over running Text Inspector.

Text Inspector released its very own API, which has allowed hundreds of users to integrate Text Inspector into their own products.

The Text Inspector blog went live, bringing together academics and users from all around to talk about their experiences of using Text Inspector.

Text Inspector won the prestigious British Council funding award, which has allowed us to begin to improve metadiscourse in Text Inspector.