Willow’s voice keyboard enables you to kind throughout all of your iOS apps — and truly edit what you stated

Some of the efficient use circumstances to have emerged from fashionable AI fashions is their potential to know the human voice higher, which has led to extra correct dictation instruments. One such Mac instrument, Willow, is launching an iOS app to let customers kind with their voice throughout all apps.

Just like Wispr Stream, Willow’s keyboard transcribes your voice and likewise codecs the message in line with the context. The app, which helps over 100 languages, enables you to outline your personal vocabulary phrases or create completely different writing types throughout app classes like work, messaging, e mail, and others.

One key benefit of Willow’s app is that there’s a full keyboard obtainable to kind, whereas Wispr Stream solely provides a numeric keyboard. This helps with fast edits to switch some phrases or sentences slightly than typing them out. Plus, you don’t have to modify to a different keyboard if you wish to kind some phrases as an alternative of talking them.

Willow was based by Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu, who attended Stanford and dropped out to construct a startup. Guo received into Y Combinator in the summertime of 2024 with a unique set of co-founders, and their preliminary concept was in healthcare — particularly to construct software program to handle assisted residing amenities. Nevertheless, the concept didn’t stick, and for a yr, the corporate tried to construct various things.

“Whereas we had been engaged on healthcare options, we observed that medical doctors have voice AI scribes that report conversations with sufferers and create paperwork for follow-ups. I had numerous conversations with medical doctors; they stated these notetakers had been very helpful to them. This nudged us to construct a voice AI instrument for information staff and different customers,” Guo instructed TechCrunch over a name.

Guo added that he selected to not construct one other AI notetaker as a result of he felt that the market was saturated. As a substitute, the dictation house was extra interesting as numerous communication takes place outdoors conferences. He stated that the corporate makes use of a sequence of fashions and focuses closely on tuning its text-to-text pipeline, which is predicated on Meta’s Llama fashions, for formatting and personalization

The startup then moved its YC batch to Spring 2025 to launch the product. The corporate stated that for the reason that launch, it has grown 50% month over month when it comes to customers. It additionally has enterprise clients like Uber, Heidi Well being, and Zeg utilizing the instrument for dictation with options like customized crew vocabulary.

Willow has raised $4.5 million from Field Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and angel buyers resembling HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah; Gusto’s Tomer London; Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian; ex-Yelp COO Kipp Bodnar; Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian; Adam Guild, co-founder and CEO of the restaurant software program firm Proprietor; and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.

Mullen stated that he believes that probably the most wonderful consumer interfaces sooner or later are going to be voice-led.

“I used to be actually impressed with Allan’s imaginative and prescient round not simply creating an ideal dictation app however, long run, aiming for creating an interface that may management your laptop,” he stated. “When I’m writing by Willow, I must make fewer edits than I needed to with a pc’s built-in dictation system.”

Mullen identified that considered one of his favourite workflows was that on desktop, you can even use the “Hey Willow” assistant to instruct the app to put in writing issues like e mail replies in your personal voice.

The startup competes with different gamers like Wispr Stream, which has raised greater than $56 million in funding so far; Monologue, which is a part of Each’s subscription bundle; and the YC-backed startups Aqua, Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdication.

Guo stated that within the coming months, it plans to do platform enlargement with Home windows and Android, together with higher personalization to scale back the variety of guide edits customers must do submit dictation.