Willow’s Voice Keyboard Lets You Type Across All Your Ios Apps — And Actually Edit What You Said

One of nan astir effective usage cases to person emerged from modern AI models is their expertise to understand nan quality sound better, which has led to much meticulous dictation tools. One specified Mac tool, Willow, is launching an iOS app to fto users type pinch their sound crossed each apps.

Similar to Wispr Flow, Willow’s keyboard transcribes your sound and besides formats nan connection according to nan context. The app, which supports complete 100 languages, lets you specify your ain vocabulary position aliases create different penning styles crossed app categories for illustration work, messaging, email, and others.

One cardinal advantage of Willow’s app is that location is simply a afloat keyboard disposable to type, whereas Wispr Flow only offers a numeric keyboard. This helps pinch speedy edits to modify immoderate words aliases sentences alternatively than typing them out. Plus, you don’t person to move to different keyboard erstwhile you want to type immoderate words alternatively of speaking them.

Image Credits Willow

Willow was founded by Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu, who attended Stanford and dropped retired to build a startup. Gui sewage into Y Combinator successful nan summertime of 2024 pinch a different group of co-founders, and their first thought was successful healthcare — specifically to build package to negociate assisted surviving facilities. However, nan thought didn’t stick, and for a year, nan institution tried to build different things.

“While we were moving connected healthcare solutions, we noticed that doctors person sound AI scribes that grounds conversations pinch patients and create documents for follow-ups. I had a batch of conversations pinch doctors; they said these notetakers were very useful to them. This nudged america to build a sound AI instrumentality for knowledge workers and different users,” Guo told TechCrunch complete a call.

Guo added that he chose not to build different AI notetaker because he felt that nan marketplace was saturated. Instead, nan dictation abstraction was much appealing arsenic a batch of connection takes spot extracurricular meetings. He said that nan institution uses a bid of models and focuses heavy connected tuning its text-to-text pipeline, which is based connected Meta’s Llama models, for formatting and personalization

Image Credits: Willow

The startup past moved its YC batch to Spring 2025 to motorboat nan product. The institution said that since nan launch, it has grown 50% period complete period successful position of users. It besides has endeavor customers for illustration Uber, Heidi Health, and Zeg utilizing nan instrumentality for dictation pinch features for illustration civilization squad vocabulary.

Willow has raised $4.5 cardinal from Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and angel investors specified arsenic 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 nan edifice package institution Owner; and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.

Mullen said that he believes that nan astir astonishing personification interfaces successful nan early are going to beryllium voice-led.

“I was really impressed pinch Allan’s imagination astir not conscionable creating a awesome dictation app but, agelong term, aiming for creating an interface that tin power your computer,” he said. “When I americium penning done Willow, I request to make less edits than I had to pinch a computer’s built-in dictation system.”

Mullen pointed retired that 1 of his favourite workflows was that connected desktop, you tin besides usage nan “Hey Willow” adjunct to instruct nan app to constitute things for illustration email replies successful your ain voice.

The startup competes pinch different players for illustration Wispr Flow, which has raised much than $56 cardinal successful backing to date; Monologue, which is portion of Every’s subscription bundle; and nan YC-backed startups Aqua, Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdication.

Guo said that successful nan coming months, it plans to do level description pinch Windows and Android, on pinch amended personalization to trim nan number of manual edits users person to do station dictation.