voice-interface
(6)
Caddy
Caddy is a personal AI for everyday work that lives in your text messages and responds to voice. Built by the team that led product and design for Loom's AI suite, it connects to the tools people already use - email, calendar, Slack, Linear, Notion - and gets work done without forcing anyone to open yet another app. You text or talk; Caddy handles the tickets, reminders, scheduling and follow-ups. The company is part of Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch and is based in New York City.
Applied Brain Research
Applied Brain Research (ABR) is a Waterloo, Ontario AI hardware company spun out of the University of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience. It builds brain-inspired chips and software that run real-time AI - full-vocabulary speech recognition, text-to-speech and sensor processing - directly on edge devices at power levels measured in milliwatts. Its patented state-space models and the Legendre Memory Unit power the TSP1 Time Series Processor, which ABR calls the world's first single-chip solution for full-vocabulary speech recognition, doing the work of cloud voice AI while consuming 10 to 100 times less power.
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.
Chin Beckmann
Chin Beckmann is the Co-Founder and CEO of DSP Concepts, the Santa Clara-based global leader in embedded audio software and creator of Audio Weaver — a platform that powers the sound systems in tens of millions of devices from Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Samsung. A concert pianist who holds degrees in Computer Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from Northeastern University, Chin co-founded DSP Concepts with her husband and CTO Paul Beckmann, building it from an audio engineering consulting firm's secret weapon into a Series C-funded company with $56.4M raised and revenue growing more than 100% since 2019. She also serves on the Audio Board of the Consumer Technology Association.
Wispr Flow
Wispr Flow is a San Francisco-based AI voice dictation platform that converts natural speech into polished, formatted text across any application at roughly 220 words per minute - about 4x faster than typing. Built by two Stanford AI researchers, the company has quietly become the voice layer that 270 Fortune 500 companies rely on, combining a 10% word error rate (vs. 27% for OpenAI Whisper), 100+ language support, and context-aware formatting that automatically adjusts tone and style based on the active app. With $81M raised and a $700M valuation as of late 2025, Wispr Flow is racing to become the default voice-first operating system for a billion users.
Tanay Kothari
Tanay Kothari is the co-founder and CEO of Wispr Flow, a San Francisco-based AI company building the voice interface for the AI era. A four-time founder who taught himself to code at age nine in New Delhi, Kothari holds BS and MS degrees from Stanford in Computer Science and AI, taught Deep Learning alongside Andrew Ng, and published medical AI research. After selling his first startup FeatherX to Cerebra Technologies straight out of college, he co-founded Wispr in 2021 with Stanford batchmate Sahaj Garg. The company's flagship product, Wispr Flow, transforms spoken ramblings into polished writing across 100+ languages with sub-second latency, achieving 50% month-over-month growth and a 20% paid conversion rate - five times the industry standard. Wispr has raised $81 million total, including a $30 million Series A led by Menlo Ventures and a $25 million extension led by Notable Capital, at a $700 million valuation. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2023, Kothari is betting that keyboards will be vintage store items within five years.