Willow’s voice keyboard lets you type across all your iOS apps — and actually edit what you said

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

Similar to Wispr Flow, Willow Keyboard transcribes your voice and also formats the message depending on the context. The app, which supports over 100 languages, allows you to define your own vocabulary terms or create different writing styles across app categories like business, messaging, email, and more.

One of the main advantages of Willow is that there is a full keyboard available for typing, while Wispr Flow only offers a numeric keyboard. This helps in making quick edits to edit some words or sentences instead of typing them. In addition, you won’t have to switch to another keyboard when you want to type some words instead of speaking them.

Willow was founded by Alan Gu and Lawrence Liu, who went to Stanford University and dropped out to create a startup. The duo joined Y Combinator in the summer of 2024 with a different group of co-founders (who have now left the company), and their initial idea was in the healthcare space — specifically to build software to manage assisted living facilities. However, the idea did not work, and the company tried for a year to build different things.

“While we were working on healthcare solutions, we noticed that doctors had AI voice clerks recording conversations with patients and creating documents for follow-up. I had a lot of conversations with doctors, and they said these note-taking tools were very helpful for them. This prompted us to build an AI voice tool for knowledge workers and other users,” Guo told TechCrunch over a phone call.

Guo added that he chose not to create another AI note-taking device because he felt the market was saturated. Instead, the dictation space was more attractive since much of the communication took place outside of meetings. He said the company uses a series of templates and focuses heavily on fine-tuning its text-to-text pipeline, which is based on Meta’s Llama templates, for formatting and customization.

The startup then moved its YC push to spring 2025 to launch the product. The company said that since launch, it has achieved 50% month-on-month growth in terms of number of users. It also has enterprise clients like Uber, Heidi Health, and Zego using the dictation tool with features like custom team vocabulary.

Willow raised $4.5 million from Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and angel investors like Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; Gusto Tomer London; Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian; former Yelp COO Kip Bodnar; Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian; Adam Guild, co-founder and CEO of restaurant software company; and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen.

Mullen said he believes the most amazing user interfaces of the future will be voice-powered.

“I was really impressed with Alan’s vision of not just creating a great dictation app but, in the long run, aiming to create an interface that can control your computer,” he said. “When I type via Willow, I need to make fewer edits than I would with the computer’s built-in dictation system.”

Mullen noted that one of his favorite workflows is that on desktop, you can also use the “Hey Willow” assistant to direct the app to type things like email responses with your voice.

The startup competes with other players such as Wispr Flow, which has raised more than $56 million in funding to date; Monologue, which is part of the Everyone Subscription Package; And YC-backed startups: Aqua, Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdictation.

In the coming months, Guo said he plans to expand the platform with Windows and Android, along with better customization to reduce the number of manual edits users have to make after dictating.