One of the most effective use cases emerging from modern AI models is the ability to better understand the human voice, which has led to more accurate listening tools. One such Mac tool, WillowLaunching An iOS app Let users type with their voice across all apps.
Like Wispro Flow, Willow’s keyboard transcribes your voice and formats the message according to context. The app, which supports more than 100 languages, lets you define your own vocabulary terms or create different writing styles across app categories like work, messages, email and others.
A major advantage of Willow’s app is that a full keyboard is available for typing, whereas Wispr Flow only offers a numeric keyboard. It helps to quickly edit some words or sentences instead of typing them. Also, you don’t have to switch to another keyboard when you want to type instead of speaking some words.
Willow was founded by Alan Guo and Lawrence Liu, who attended Stanford and dropped out to build a startup. Guo entered Y Combinator in the summer of 2024 with a different set of co-founders, and their initial idea was to build software to manage healthcare — specifically assisted living facilities. However, the idea didn’t stick, and over the course of a year, the company tried to make different things.
“When we were working on healthcare solutions, we noticed that doctors have voice AI scribes who record conversations with patients and create documents for follow-up. I’ve had many conversations with doctors; they say these notetakers are very useful for them. This encouraged us to develop a voice AI tool for knowledge workers and other users,” Guo told TechCrunch in a call.
Guo added that he chose not to build another AI note taker because he felt the market was saturated. Instead, the auditory space was more interesting as a lot of communication took place outside of the meeting. He said the company uses a series of models and focuses heavily on tuning its text-to-text pipeline, which is based on the Mater Lama model for formatting and personalization.
The startup then moved its YC batch to Spring 2025 to launch the product. The company said that since launch, it has seen 50% month-on-month growth in terms of users. It also has enterprise customers like Uber, Heidi Health, and Zeg who use the tool to talk with features like custom team vocabularies.
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Raised $4.5 million from angel investors like Willow Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; Gusto’s Tomer London; Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian; former Yelp COO Kip Bodner; Kaz Nezatian, CEO of Opendoor; 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 of the future are going to be voice-led.
“I’m really impressed with Alan’s vision to not just create a great dictation app but, in the long term, to create an interface that can control your computer,” he said. “When I’m writing through Willow, I have to edit less than with a computer’s built-in dictation system.”
Mullen noted that one of his favorite workflows is that on the desktop, you can use the “Hey Willow” assistant to instruct the app to write things like email replies with your own voice.
The startup competes with other players like Wispro Flow, which has so far raised over $56 million in funding; monologuewhich is part of Everyone’s subscription bundle; and YC-backed startups Akua, talktastic, SuperwhisperAnd Betterdication.
Guo said that in the coming months, it plans to expand the platform to include Windows and Android, along with better personalization to reduce the number of manual edits users need to post dictation.