With Willow’s voice keyboard you can type in all your iOS apps – and actually edit what you’ve said | TechCrunch

One of the most effective use cases to emerge from modern AI models is their ability to better understand the human voice, leading to more accurate dictation tools. One such Mac tool, Willowis launched an iOS app to let users type with their voice in all apps.

Similar to Wispr Flow, Willow’s keyboard transcribes your voice and also formats the message according to context. The app, which supports more than 100 languages, allows you to define your own vocabulary terms or create different writing styles for app categories such as work, messaging, email and others.

A key advantage of Willow’s app is that a full keyboard is available for typing, while Wispr Flow only offers a numeric keypad. This helps with quick edits to change some words or sentences instead of typing them out. Plus, you don’t have to switch to another keyboard if you want to type certain words instead of speaking them.

Willow was founded by Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu, who attended and dropped out of Stanford to build a startup. The duo started at Y Combinator in the summer of 2024 with another group of co-founders (who have now left the company), and their original idea was in healthcare – specifically to build software to manage assisted living facilities. However, the idea did not take off and for a year the company tried to build different things.

“While working on healthcare solutions, we noticed that doctors have voice AI recorders who record conversations with patients and create documents for follow-ups. I’ve had many conversations with doctors; they said these note takers were very useful to them. This prompted us to build a voice AI tool for knowledge workers and other users,” Guo told TechCrunch during a call.

Guo added that he chose not to build a new AI note taker because he felt the market was saturated. Instead, the dictation room was more attractive because a lot of communication takes place outside of meetings. He said the company uses a range of models and focuses heavily on fine-tuning its text-to-text pipeline, which is based on Meta’s Llama models, for formatting and personalization.

The startup then moved its YC batch to spring 2025 to launch the product. The company said it has grown 50% month over month in terms of users since launch. It also has enterprise customers such as Uber, Heidi Health and Zego who use the tool for dictation with features such as custom team vocabulary.

Willow has raised $4.5 million from Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital and angel investors such as 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 restaurant software company Owner; and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.

Mullen said he believes the most amazing user interfaces in the future will be voice-activated.

“I was very impressed with Allan’s vision, not just to create a great dictation app, but to long-term create an interface that can control your computer,” he said. “When I write through Willow, I have to make fewer edits than with a computer’s built-in dictation system.”

Mullen pointed out that one of his favorite workflows was that on the desktop you can also use the “Hey Willow” assistant to instruct the app to write things like email replies in your own voice.

The startup competes with other players such as Wispr Flow, which has raised over $56 million in funding to date; Monologuethat is part of Everyone’s subscription bundle; and the YC-backed startups Aqua, Chatty, Super whisperingAnd Better indication.

Guo said it plans to expand the platform to include Windows and Android in the coming months, along with better personalization to reduce the number of manual operations users need to perform after dictating.