How Wispr Flow Uses AI to Save Professionals Hours Every Day

Tanay Kothari is the cofounder and CEO of Wispr, the company behind an AI-powered voice dictation app called Flow. Prior to starting Wispr in 2021, Tanay has been a serial entrepreneur for 16 years since he taught himself how to code as a child. He has founded multiple companies, many of them focused on the next generation of personal computing after Tanay was inspired by the character J.A.R.V.I.S. in the movie Iron Man. He has also held product and engineering roles at Cerebra Technologies and Microsoft and served as a Computer Science teaching assistant at Stanford University.

Key Takeaways:

• Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg cofounded Wispr in 2021 with the vision of using a native voice interface to power the next generation of personal computing. Since then, the company iterated through seven other products before ultimately finding strong product/market fit with an AI-powered voice dictation app called Flow.
• The biggest thing Wispr Flow has done to differentiate its product vs. other voice dictation tools is tackle the upfront technical challenges that allow their product to work horizontally across any other single application. This year, Wispr Flow has been used successfully across over 25,000 different apps and websites.
• Unlike other voice dictation tools that transcribe what a user speaks verbatim, Wispr Flow waits until a user has finished talking and then transcribes a polished version based on what the user would want if they were writing. It uses context awareness to understand what type of message the user is writing (email, text message, etc.) and then makes formatting decisions based on that context.
• Two KPIs that Wispr Flow uses to measure product/market fit are zero edit rate and average time to send after completing a message. Wispr Flow’s zero edit rate is currently 81% and its average time to send is half a second, both of which are best-in-class vs. other voice dictation apps (including Apple and Google).
• Wispr Flow has early adopters across a broad range of users, including founders and business leaders, engineers, creative influencers, and senior citizens. Its horizontal use case and simple and intuitive interface have also driven viral word of mouth, allowing the company to rapidly expand across international borders.

Tanay Kothari:

• Website: https://wisprflow.ai/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tankots/
• X: https://x.com/tankots

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Chapters

• 3:22 Why Tanay and his cofounder started Wispr
• 6:34 What differentiates Wispr Flow from other voice dictation tools
• 9:46 Wispr Flow’s contrarian design decisions
• 13:01 Technical challenges that Wispr Flow has needed to overcome
• 15:26 How Wispr Flow uses context awareness to tailor its outputs
• 17:50 Why Wispr Flow decided to launch across platforms sequentially
• 21:12 How Apple has inspired Wispr's company culture
• 24:41 Who are Wispr Flow’s early adopters
• 27:44 KPIs Wispr Flow uses to measure product/market fit
• 30:17 The top apps that people are using Wispr Flow for
• 32:48 When Wispr Flow knew that it had product/market fit
• 37:15 How Wispr Flow generates virality through influencers
• 40:47 Wispr Flow’s long-term growth strategy and team structure
• 45:06 How Wispr Flow has approached international expansion
• 46:00 Lightning round