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

Some of the efficient use circumstances to have emerged from fashionable AI fashions is their potential to grasp 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 Circulate, Willow’s keyboard transcribes your voice and likewise codecs the message in response to the context. The app, which helps over 100 languages, allows you to outline your personal vocabulary phrases or create completely different writing kinds throughout app classes like work, messaging, electronic mail, and others.

One key benefit of Willow’s app is that there’s a full keyboard obtainable to kind, whereas Wispr Circulate solely affords a numeric keyboard. This helps with fast edits to change some phrases or sentences quite than typing them out. Plus, you don’t have to modify to a different keyboard while 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. Gui 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 dwelling services. Nonetheless, the thought didn’t stick, and for a 12 months, the corporate tried to construct various things.

“While we were working on healthcare solutions, we noticed that doctors have voice AI scribes that record conversations with patients and create documents for follow-ups. I had a lot of conversations with doctors; they said these notetakers were very useful to them. This nudged us to build a voice AI tool for knowledge workers and other users,” Guo advised 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 plenty of communication takes place exterior conferences. He stated that the corporate makes use of a collection of fashions and focuses closely on tuning its text-to-text pipeline, which relies 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 because the launch, it has grown 50% month over month by way of customers. It additionally has enterprise clients like Uber, Heidi Health, and Zeg utilizing the instrument for dictation with options like customized workforce vocabulary.

Willow has raised $4.5 million from Field Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and angel buyers reminiscent of 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 essentially the most wonderful consumer interfaces sooner or later are going to be voice-led.

“I was really impressed with Allan’s vision around not just creating a great dictation app but, long term, aiming for creating an interface that can control your computer,” he stated. “When I am writing through Willow, I need to make fewer edits than I had to with a computer’s built-in dictation system.”

Mullen identified that certainly 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 electronic mail replies in your personal voice.

The startup competes with different gamers like Wispr Circulate, which has raised greater than $56 million in funding thus 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 growth with Home windows and Android, together with higher personalization to cut back the variety of guide edits customers must do publish dictation.