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[ARTICLE · art-108312] src=openthemagazine.com ↗ pub= topic=artificial-intelligence verified=true sentiment=· neutral

Listening Post: An AI voice dictation company wants to make the keyboard obsolete

Wispr, a five-year-old AI voice dictation company founded by Stanford University students, has reached a $2 billion valuation after a funding round, up from $700 million in November 2025. The company's product, Wispr Flow, aims to make the keyboard obsolete, and it has previewed a new speech recognition model called Canto with 2 billion parameters. Co-founder Tanay Kothari stated that larger speech models open the door to using voice as the primary way to interact with devices, a vision the company has had for five years.

read1 min views1 publishedAug 24, 2026
Listening Post: An AI voice dictation company wants to make the keyboard obsolete
Image: Openthemagazine (auto-discovered)

In November 2025, Wispr was valued at $700 million, and after a round of funding less than a year later, it is now a $2 billion company. The five-year-old company wants to make the keyboard obsolete and Wispr Flow is its dictation tool underpinned by artificial intelligence. It is partly free and works on laptops and across apps on mobile phones, accurate at picking out names and other elements.

It was founded by two Stanford University students. Tanay Kothari, one of the founders, who studied in Delhi, and then moved to the US, made a post on X talking about how even last year people were doubting voice as a technology, but now they speak about how useful it is and what they want next from it. New features have been coming. Besides an AI notetaker for meetings, they have also now previewed a new speech recognition model called Canto which has 2 billion parameters.

He added in the post: “Larger speech models also open the door to the vision we dreamed up five years ago: using your voice as the primary way you interact with devices. That still has to be invented. A voice interface people rely on all day, in every app, doesn’t exist anywhere yet. It’s time for that to change.”

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