voice-first
(4)
Blue
Blue is a Y Combinator-backed (S25) startup building a voice-first way to operate an iPhone. Its shipping product is the Blue Smart Dictation Keyboard, an iOS keyboard that turns spoken thoughts into polished text and is pitched as roughly four times faster than typing. The longer-term product is a small USB-C dongle plus app that lets you speak a task - send a follow-up, book something, reply to a thread - and have Blue open the right app and carry it out hands-free. The founding team previously worked on Google Assistant, Google DeepMind, and Apple Vision Pro.
jo
jo is a voice-first personal AI agent for macOS that runs on your Mac and a private, per-user cloud machine. Rather than waiting to be asked, it proactively summarizes what is on your screen, drafts emails, manages your calendar, clips relevant content, and keeps up with the loose ends of work and life. Built natively in Swift for Apple Silicon and backed by Y Combinator (W24), jo reaches users across Mac, web, iMessage, Telegram, and WhatsApp while keeping personal data local and out of model training.
Willow
Willow is a San Francisco startup building voice-first interfaces that turn natural speech into polished text across every app on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Founded in 2024 by Stanford dropouts Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu and backed by Y Combinator, Willow promises roughly 3x the accuracy of built-in dictation with ~200ms response time, automatic filler-word removal, style-matching, and an AI mode that reshapes rough spoken notes into finished messages. The company raised $4.2M in seed funding and has grown roughly 50% month over month, with early enterprise users including Uber, Heidi Health, and Zego.
Allan Guo
Allan Guo is the co-founder and CEO of Willow, a San Francisco AI voice-dictation app that lets you write anywhere on your computer by talking. A Stanford CS student who dropped out as a freshman to build a healthcare startup, he pivoted more than ten times before landing on voice as the interface. Willow, part of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch, raised $4.2 million led by BoxGroup with backing from founders at Instacart, Shopify, HubSpot and Gusto. Guo's pitch is blunt: the keyboard is the last slow thing on a fast computer, and he intends to kill it.