The voice interface quietly trying to retire your keyboard. You talk. It writes. Across every app, on Mac, Windows and iPhone.
Since 1868 we've all agreed to press small squares in a deliberately awkward order. Willow thinks the agreement is up for renegotiation.
Open a laptop in any coffee shop in San Francisco and you'll hear the same thing: a soft clatter of keys, the sound of people translating thoughts into finger movements. Now look closer. A few of them aren't typing. They're talking - quietly, unhurried - and full sentences are landing in their email, their Slack, their code editor, already clean. That's Willow at work.
Willow is a voice dictation tool that turns speech into finished text across any application. Not the robotic dictation you remember from a decade ago, where you had to say "comma" and "new paragraph" and then spend ten minutes fixing the wreckage. Willow removes the "ums," adds the punctuation, matches how you actually write, and hands you a paragraph you'd be happy to send. The company's own line for it is refreshingly plain: Speak naturally, Willow writes it.
A lot of communication takes place outside meetings.
That sentence is the whole thesis. The AI world spent two years building tools to summarize meetings. Willow noticed that the real firehose of writing - the emails, the messages, the documents, the prompts fed to other AIs - happens everywhere else, all day, one keystroke at a time. If you could speak all of it at the speed of thought, you'd get a chunk of your week back.
Willow markets a roughly 3x accuracy jump over built-in dictation and claims users write about 4x faster - reclaiming something like five hours a week. Numbers like these are self-reported, so read them as ambition backed by traction rather than audited fact. The growth curve, at least, is the kind that makes investors return calls.
Willow isn't one app so much as a layer that sits on top of everything you already use.
Works across every app with smart formatting, filler-word removal, and a dictionary that learns your names and jargon. Offline mode and a "Hey Willow" assistant included.
A voice keyboard for every iOS app, with a full keyboard right there for edits. You can correct what you said instead of re-recording the whole thing.
Speak a rough, half-formed note and Willow reshapes it into a clean, context-appropriate message for email, chat, or docs.
Tuned for coding environments like Cursor and AI IDEs - it handles technical vocabulary and hands-free prompting without turning "async" into "a sink."
Speak under your breath in a shared office or cafe and Willow still keeps up - built for the awkward reality of talking to your computer in public.
A team and enterprise tier for organizations adopting voice dictation at scale, with the security posture to match.
Willow is the thing that finally worked. Before it, there was a healthcare startup, a lot of dead ends, and a year in the trenches.
Left Stanford as a freshman, watched his first startup fail, and pivoted more than ten times before landing on voice. Lists his own title as "Chief Keyboard Killer." He's 19.
Guo's co-founder and the other half of the Stanford exit. Together they took Willow through Y Combinator and turned a decade-old idea - dictation - into something people actually keep open.
We pivoted over 10 times, spent a year in the trenches, and learned how to build.
Make communication faster and more natural by letting people speak instead of type - turning voice into polished text across any app, on any device. The longer bet: a voice-first interface where speaking is how you write and steer your computer.
The obvious rival is Wispr Flow - same rough price, different fit. Then Superwhisper, Aqua Voice, MacWhisper, and the free built-in dictation from Apple, Google and Microsoft. Willow's wager is that "good enough and free" loses to "fast, accurate, and editable."
Same cafe. Same clatter of keys. But now the person who used to hunt-and-peck through email is leaning back, coffee in hand, talking in a low voice while the messages write themselves - filler stripped, tone matched, sent. The keyboard is still on the table. It's just not doing much anymore.
Willow hasn't killed the keyboard - not yet, and maybe not ever. But it has done something quieter and more interesting: it made talking to your computer feel normal. Two Stanford dropouts, ten-plus pivots, and a $4.2M bet later, the sound of work is starting to change. Less clatter. More conversation.
Speak naturally, Willow writes it.