All posts tagged: voice AI

Voice AI in India is hard. Wispr Flow is betting on it anyway.

Voice AI in India is hard. Wispr Flow is betting on it anyway.

Published by skeptic

India’s internet users already rely heavily on voice notes, voice search, and multilingual messaging. Turning those habits into a scalable AI business, however, remains difficult because of the country’s linguistic complexity, mixed-language usage, and uneven monetization patterns. Wispr Flow is betting the opportunity is worth the challenge. The Bay Area-headquartered startup, which builds AI-powered voice input software, says India is now its fastest-growing market, even though voice-based AI products remain early and fragmented in the South Asian nation. That growth has pushed Wispr Flow to expand more aggressively for Indian users, beginning with Hinglish — a hybrid mix of Hindi and English commonly spoken by locals. The startup is also planning broader multilingual voice support, a local hiring push, and, eventually, lower pricing as it looks to expand beyond white-collar users and into Indian households. Earlier waves of voice technology in India — from digital assistants to WhatsApp voice notes — largely revolved around convenience. AI startups such as Wispr Flow are now betting that generative AI can turn those habits into a broader computing …

The best AI dictation apps, tested and ranked

The best AI dictation apps, tested and ranked

Published by skeptic

AI dictation apps have come a long way in a short time. For years they were slow and inaccurate — unless you spoke with a particular accent and enunciated clearly. Advances in large language models (LLMs) and speech-to-text models have changed that, producing systems that can decipher speech more accurately while retaining enough context to format the text correctly. Developers have also built in features to automatically remove filler words, fix stumbles, and handle punctuation — outputting text that needs far fewer edits. With dozens of such apps now on the market, we’ve rounded up our picks for the best and most useful dictation apps available right now. Wispr Flow Wispr Flow is a well-funded AI dictation app that lets you add custom words and instructions for dictation. It has native apps for macOS, Windows, and iOS; an Android version is in the works. The app lets you customize how it transcribes your text by choosing from “formal,” “casual,” and “very casual” styles for different kinds of writing, such as personal messaging, work, and email. …

DeepL, known for text translation, now wants to translate your voice

DeepL, known for text translation, now wants to translate your voice

Published by skeptic

DeepL, a translation company best known for its text tools, released a voice-to-voice translation suite today that covers use cases like meetings, mobile and web conversations, and group conversations for frontline workers through custom apps. The company is also releasing an API that lets outside developers and businesses build on top of DeepL’s tech for customized use cases, such as call centers. “After spending so many years in text translation, voice was a natural step for us,” DeepL CEO Jarek Kutylowski told TechCrunch in an interview. “We have come a long way when it comes to text translation and document translation. But we thought there wasn’t a great product for real-time voice translation.” Kutylowski said that the challenges in creating a real-time translation product center on striking a balance between reducing latency — the delay between someone speaking and the translated audio playing back — and maintaining accurate results. DeepL is releasing add-ons for platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, where listeners can either hear real-time translation while others are speaking in native languages or …

Google quietly launched an AI dictation app that works offline

Google quietly launched an AI dictation app that works offline

Published by skeptic

Google on Monday quietly released an offline-first dictation app called “Google AI Edge Eloquent” on iOS to take on the likes of Wispr Flow, SuperWhisper, Willow, and others. The app is free to download, and once its Gemma-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are downloaded, you can start dictating on your phone. In the app, you can see the live transcription, and when you hit pause, the app automatically filters out filler words like “um” and “ah” and polishes the text. Below the transcript are options like “Key points”, “Formal”, “Short”, and “Long” to transform the text. Image Credit: Screenshot by TechCrunchImage Credits:Screenshot by TechCrunch You can also turn off the cloud mode to use local-only processing. (When cloud mode is on, the app uses cloud-based Gemini models for text cleanup.) The Google AI Edge Eloquent can import certain keywords, names, and jargon from your Gmail account, if desired. Plus, you can add your own custom words to the list. The app displays the history of the transcription session and lets you search through all …

ElevenLabs raises 0M from Sequoia at an billion valuation

ElevenLabs raises $500M from Sequoia at an $11 billion valuation

Published by skeptic

Voice AI company ElevenLabs said today it raised $500 million in a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital, which was an investor in the startup’s last secondary round through a tender. Sequoia partner Andrew Reed is joining the company’s board. The startup is now valued at $11 billion, more than three times its valuation in its last round in January 2025. Earlier in the year, the Financial Times reported that the startup was looking to raise at that valuation. The company said that existing investor a16z quadrupled its investment amount, and Iconiq, which led the last round, tripled it. Some prior investors, like BroadLight, NFDG, Valor Capital, AMP Coalition, and Smash Capital, also joined the round. New investors for the funding included Lightspeed Venture Partners, EvanticCapital, and Bond. ElevenLabs said that it will disclose some investors later in February, which might be strategic partners. The company has raised over $781 million to date. It said that it will use the funding for research and product development, along with expansion in international markets like India, …

Bolna nabs .3M from General Catalyst for its India-focused voice orchestration platform

Bolna nabs $6.3M from General Catalyst for its India-focused voice orchestration platform

Published by skeptic

Industry reports and the growth of voice model companies in the Indian market suggest that there is a growing demand for voice AI solutions in the country. Voice is a popular medium for communication among people and businesses in India. That’s why enterprises and startups are eager to use voice AI to be more efficient at customer support, sales, customer acquisition, hiring, and training. But recognizing market demand is one thing — proving businesses will pay is another. Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. “When we were applying for Y Combinator, the feedback we got was, ‘great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,’” Wagh told TechCrunch. The startup applied with the same idea for the fall batch …

The AI healthcare gold rush is here

The AI healthcare gold rush is here

Published by skeptic

AI companies are clustering around healthcare and fast.  In just the past week, OpenAI bought health startup Torch, Anthropic launched Claude for healthcare, and Sam Altman-backed MergeLabs closed a $250 million seed round at an $850 million valuation. The money and products are pouring into health and voice AI, but so are concerns about hallucination risks, inaccurate medical information, and massive security vulnerabilities in systems handling sensitive patient data.  Watch as Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into why the AI world is suddenly obsessed with health care, what other products can expect an AI-makeover, and more.  Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.  Source link

ElevenLabs raises 0M from Sequoia at an billion valuation

ElevenLabs CEO says the voice AI startup crossed $330 million ARR last year

Published by skeptic

ElevenLabs, the AI voice generation startup, crossed $330 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), CEO Mati Staniszewski said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Really, what this [growth in ARR] shows is that trajectory across the company. We started the company in 2022 and launched the first product in 2023. It took us 20 months to reach $100 million in ARR, 10 months to reach $200 million, and five months to reach the current number,” he said. Staniszewski mentioned that both Fortune 500 companies and startups are adopting its voice agent technology, which uses company data and knowledge bases to power customer support and customer experience interactions. In a separate post on X, the company noted that enterprises have deployed its technology to handle more than 50,000 calls per month. The startup raised $180 million in Series C funding co-led by a16z and ICONIQ Growth at a $3.3 billion valuation in June 2025. It then doubled its valuation three months later when ICONIQ and another earlier investor, Sequoia, shelled out another $100 million to snap up …

Subtle releases ear buds with its noise cancelation models

Subtle releases ear buds with its noise cancelation models

Published by skeptic

Voice AI startup Subtle, which creates voice isolation models to have computers understand you better in loud environments, today launched a new pair of wireless earbuds that help users sound clear in calls and get clear transcription for notes. The company unveiled these earbuds ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and said that it plans to ship them in the U.S. in the next few months. The buds cost $199 and will come with a year-long subscription to the iOS and Mac app. The app will let users take voice notes or chat with AI without pressing any keys. The company said it is using a chip that allows it to wake the iPhone while it is locked. The startup is also trying to compete with AI-powered voice dictation apps such as Wispr Flow, Willow, Monolouge, and Superwhisper by allowing users to dictate in any app using the voice buds. The company claimed that buds would deliver five times fewer errors than AirPods Pro 3 combined with OpenAI’s transcription model. In …

The best AI dictation apps, tested and ranked

The best AI-powered dictation apps of 2025

Published by skeptic

In some ways, 2025 was when AI dictation apps really took off. Dictation apps have been around for years, but in the past they’ve proved slow and inaccurate — unless you speak with particular accents and enunciate clearly. But advances in large language models (LLMs) and speech-to-text models have helped improve the systems that can decipher speech better while retaining the context to format the text. And developers have built in features to automatically format text, remove filler words, and ignore fumbles to output text that would need fewer edits. But with the soaring popularity of everything AI, there’s dozens of such apps on the market. So we’ve collated our pick of the best and most useful dictation apps his year. Wispr Flow Wispr Flow is a well-funded AI dictation app that lets you add custom words and instructions for dictation. It has native apps for macOS, Windows, and iOS, and an Android version is in the works. The app lets you customize how its system transcribes your notes by letting you choose from “formal,” …