Willow brings voice-first typing to iPhone with a context-aware AI keyboard
Voice is quickly becoming the most natural way to get things done on our devices, and dictation has finally caught up. Willow, a popular Mac tool for voice-driven typing, is launching an iOS keyboard that lets you speak to type in any app—messages, email, docs, and more—without sacrificing accuracy or control.
Unlike basic dictation, Willow’s keyboard transcribes your speech and formats it to fit the context of what you’re writing. It supports more than 100 languages, and you can teach it custom vocabulary or set distinct writing styles for different scenarios like work, messaging, or email. That means fewer awkward rewrites and more texts, notes, and emails that sound like you.
A standout advantage is that Willow includes a full keyboard alongside its voice input. Competitors like Wispr Flow limit you to a numeric layout, but Willow’s approach makes quick edits painless and removes the need to switch keyboards when you want to type a word or tweak a sentence.
Willow was founded by Allan Guo and Lawrence Liu, who left Stanford to build the company. Guo initially joined Y Combinator in summer 2024 with a different team working on healthcare software for assisted living facilities. After seeing how doctors relied on AI voice scribes to capture patient conversations and generate follow-ups, the team pivoted from meeting notes to everyday dictation—where most communication actually happens. Willow uses a series of models and emphasizes tuning its text-to-text pipeline, based on Meta’s Llama models, to deliver smarter formatting and deep personalization.
The startup moved its YC batch to Spring 2025 to launch the product and says user growth has climbed 50% month over month since then. Enterprise customers including Uber, Heidi Health, and Zeg are already using Willow for dictation, with features like shared team vocabulary to keep language consistent across organizations.
Willow has raised $4.5 million from Box Group, Y Combinator, Burst Capital, and notable angel investors including Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot, Tomer London of Gusto, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, ex-Yelp COO Kipp Bodnar, Adam Guild of Owner, and Instacart co-founder Max Mullen. Mullen believes voice-led interfaces will define the next era of computing and says he makes fewer edits with Willow than with built-in dictation tools. On desktop, a “Hey Willow” assistant can even draft replies—such as emails—in your own voice.
The company is entering a busy space with rivals like Wispr Flow, Monologue, and YC-backed teams including Aqua, Talktastic, Superwhisper, and Betterdication. Willow aims to stand out with its blend of high-accuracy transcription, context-aware formatting, and seamless keyboard integration. Up next, the team plans to expand to Windows and Android and push personalization even further to cut down on manual edits after dictation.
For anyone who prefers speaking to typing, Willow’s iOS keyboard turns voice into a fast, flexible, and genuinely productive way to write across every app you use.
