Willow, an AI dictation startup out of Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch, today launched a voice keyboard on the iOS App Store. The pitch is straightforward: speak anywhere you type on iPhone and get clean, well-structured text that matches your tone and the app you’re in. The company says usage has grown about 50% month over month since spring and now reaches tens of thousands of people at companies like Canva, GitHub, and Uber.
Watch a demo of Willow here: https://youtu.be/8q9FRS8Km5U?si=mW7czOtOguEUklpQ
Why this matters
Voice should be faster than typing, but most tools fall short. They miss names and acronyms. They ignore context, so a text reads like an email and an email reads like a note. They don’t handle formatting, which forces users to fix bullets, paragraphs, and line breaks by hand. The speed advantage disappears when you spend more time editing than speaking.
“Willow is hands down my favorite new way to write. It makes writing long messages, emails, and notes 10x faster than typing by hand,” said Max Musing, founder of Basedash. “It’s especially helpful for inputting large amounts of context for AI prompts that I would otherwise be too lazy to type by hand. This has been a game changer for coding with AI.”
What Willow does
Willow ships as a full iOS keyboard, so it works anywhere you can type, Mail, Messages, Slack, Notes, Docs, and beyond. You talk. It writes what you meant to say, not just what it heard.
Key capabilities:
- Works anywhere. A system keyboard that functions across iOS apps.
- AI rewrite. Turns raw speech-to-text into clear, concise writing.
- Style matching. Adapts to context—texting vs. email vs. Slack.
- Higher accuracy. Willow claims it is 3× more accurate than Apple’s built-in dictation.
- Faster edits. Automatic formatting, intelligent corrections, and a custom dictionary.
“Most dictation tools focus on the wrong thing – they make you spend more time editing than speaking,” said Allan Guo, co-founder and CEO of Willow. “Willow actually adapts to your writing style across different contexts and uses AI to handle formatting and corrections. Our goal is to build a world where the app disappears entirely, where you can just talk to your computer like a person and it truly understands you.”
Early traction and business model
Since releasing a web app in spring 2025, Willow reports steady revenue growth, about 50% monthly, and broad usage among power users who write long emails, log notes, or feed large prompts into AI tools. The iOS launch brings that workflow into every mobile app.
Dictation on phones has been around for years, but accuracy and context have been the sticking points. Getting the words right is table stakes. Matching tone and intent is harder. A quick Slack ping should sound casual. A customer email should sound polished. And neither should need manual fixes for bullets or paragraph breaks. Willow’s bet is that “speech-in, finished draft-out” is the bar users want, especially as more work shifts into AI-assisted flows that depend on high-quality prompts and notes.
Funding and what’s next
Willow has raised $4.5 million from Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and a group of angel investors including Max Mullen, Dharmesh Shah, Tomer London, Alexis Ohanian, Kipp Bodnar, Kaz Nejatian, and Adam Guild. The plan from here is clear: keep pushing accuracy, make the keyboard feel invisible, and expand team features for companies that want consistent tone and shared dictionaries across departments.
The Willow voice keyboard is available now on the App Store at: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/willow-ai-voice-dictation/id6753057525
