Wispr Flow

Wispr Flow is especially good for those who have a lot to say but starting to write feels dreadful. When I am writing a V1 of a YouTube script or review, I always use Wispr Flow to get my thoughts out.

We've all heard the term 10x engineer, and now with AI, 100x engineer. Part of what makes engineers move faster is talking through AI prompts rather than typing it all out. If you're coding and not using a tool like Wispr Flow, you're being slowed down.

Our Head of Engineering uses Wispr Flow to code all the time, and we're grateful for it. If you have engineers on your team, getting them a subscription will save them time, and you money.

I’ve heard Codie Sanchez (entrepreneur and investor known for buying “boring businesses” like laundromats and car washes) mention that she'll go on the treadmill and answer her emails and Slack by voice so of course I had to try the same.

Now if I just need to get away from my computer, I'll go to our gym downstairs and triage messages by voice.

Another use-case is if I want to leave somebody a more thoughtful message, but don't want to sit there and write all day, I'll use Wispr Flow. It's better than sending someone an eight-minute voice memo in a professional setting. I absolutely have friends where we'll send each other voice messages, and it feels like catching up on a call. But in work? Sending someone an eight-minute waveform is kind of brutal.

So, for my business owners, professionals, and knowledge workers out there who have so many ideas piling up faster than you can get them out, and you just want a faster, lighter way to work, Wispr Flow is absolutely for you!

Me and a friend were on the way to get coffee together, and I started using Wispr Flow to respond to a text. She asked me, "How's that thing any different than using Apple's dictation?" Valid question. I explained that "Wispr Flow's way better, other speech-to-text tools write out all my mistakes, but this tool uses AI to clean up my speech even when I have to self-correct mid-sentence."

So even if I were to text her right now to plan another coffee date and say something like, "Hey, let's meet Wednesday for coffee," and then I say, "Or actually Tuesday," it'll correct itself. Because it's so intelligent, it saves me from having to edit an exact transcription of my errors, and what is the point of me using a tool if I'm constantly editing it? Otherwise, it's just replacing typing fatigue with editing fatigue.

I love how easy Wispr Flow made it to use their product! On desktop, it's extremely easy. I just hit my shortcut and start talking in Slack, email, ChatGPT, Claude wherever.

On my iPhone, it works, but there's a tiny bit more friction because it has to take over the keyboard. The extra second is not a huge deal, but it's enough to notice. Once it's active, though, you can keep using it without needing that keyboard swap to happen again.

But I will say Alex is on Android, and it works pretty seamlessly. It just hovers above the keyboard, and he can press it or hold it down when he's ready to speak.

I’ve also tried the built-in transcription inside some of the newer AI browsers, and for me, it hasn't been reliable enough. There've been bugs where it does not pick things up properly. So even with tools that have dictation built in, I find myself using Wispr Flow regardless.

I also love that if for some reason my dictated text didn't paste it, Wispr Flow automatically copies it to its clipboard so nothing is lost and I don't have to repeat myself.

It's also worth mentioning that since you can use Wispr Flow anywhere, you might want to customize your shortcuts to your setup. I have two since I have a keyboard that I use for my monitor, then I have one on my laptop because I don't have the same keys next to each other. So, I do encourage you to set up multiple keyboard shortcuts so you don't get stuck.

Wispr Flow has tried to personalize how you write depending on the context. For example, more casual for text, more personal for work messages, things like that. It's definitely trying to make the output sound like you instead of generic AI. I think that they're heading in the right direction, but it is, in general, a really hard problem to get right.

At one point, they leaned harder into the AI rewrite side of things, where you could just talk and it would turn everything into this polished paragraph for you. I tried it, and my immediate reaction was basically, nope, absolutely not.

It made me sound weirdly formal, and that is the problem I have with AI all the time. Sure, it sounds "better," but the soul is gone. I'd much rather have Wispr Flow keep what I actually meant. I changed my setting to "Light Cleanup" and I prefer it to the default.

There's also a dictionary section that's trying to help the AI understand how you speak better. I've gone in before and added phrases that I say, especially during text or in Slack messages, that are more jargon or lingo. It's nice because I don't have to say the letters out loud, which just sounds odd. It automatically tacks them in for me. It's great for uncommon names too, I know when I used other dictation tools it would just come up with a word that sounded similar to unique names, so this is perfect.

Something to be aware of is that style and tone customizations are only available for the English language.

As I was preparing for this review, I was asking around, and one of my colleagues had especially great things to say about the multi-language support within Wispr Flow. She said she loved how she could respond to a Slack in English, then open her phone and respond to her mom in Spanish. She didn't have to change language settings or work harder to correct grammar issues like she did in other tools!

That is exactly how this kind of feature should work. If you operate across languages, you do not want to babysit the tool. You want it to keep up. Right now, Wispr Flow supports over 100 languages and can detect and switch between them on the fly, so if you work across languages or have team members who do, this will be so helpful. It's genuinely impressive and rarely this seamless in other tools.

Wispr Flow Snippets let you say something like "my calendar link" or "my email address" and have it paste the full link in for you. Which makes complete sense, especially if you send the same links all day. I can absolutely see this value here, especially for sales or support. Pretty much anyone who's repeating the same stuff constantly.

I also think that this feature could be a bit more flexible. Right now, you have to use the exact phrase you set up for it to trigger, so I do kind of wish it leaned more on AI to understand what I meant and insert the right snippet based on context instead of needing the exact wording.

Anything you dictate gets saved in a clipboard-style history inside Wispr Flow. So if you say something that didn't paste right, or accidentally lose it, it's still there.

Most of the time, you're just speaking directly into Slack, Docs, or wherever and moving on. But every now and then, I've had a moment where I'm like, "wait, what did I just say?" and I'll go grab it out of the Clipboard.

On the Pro plan, you have access to "Command Mode." It's used to either help you edit text as you go, or since it's also connected to Perplexity, you can ask questions in a "Hey, Alexa" or "Hey, Google" kind of way.

Command Mode is one of those features where I can see the use case, but it is not a big reason I use Flow. Since we already use Atlas, I can highlight something and clean it up there pretty easily, so this feels a little redundant for my workflow. If I were in a more basic browser setup, then it might be useful to make corrections mid-dictation without having to stop to manually fix or improve on a certain paragraph. But for me, I like Wispr Flow for the dictation itself, and I'm not trying to turn it into an all-in-one assistant.

I actually do like the stats they give you. It shows things like your streak, total words dictated, and how many apps you've used it in. I’m currently in the top 1% of Flow users with 125,000+ words dictated across 35+ apps, which… yeah, that checks out.

Wispr Flow has a dedicated workflow for developers who want to use voice to narrate code context or prompt AI coding tools faster. I don't personally use this, but one of our colleagues uses Windsurf and said, "It works the same way it does everywhere else... fast and simple."

I also asked our Head of Engineering, Bob, if he's been using Wispr Flow since we introduced him to it.

I think as more people start to build with AI-assisted coding, having the ability to speak your intent rather than type it is going to boost productivity for sure.

Wispr Flow uses something called context awareness, which is how it knows whether you're dictating a Slack message, an email, or a doc and adjusts the tone accordingly.

To do that, it needs to read what's on your screen. Early on, that raised some concerns from users, there was even a public incident and the CTO had to come out and apologize.

Since then, they've made changes to the product: context data is now processed locally on your device rather than through screenshots, you can toggle it off entirely, and they've earned SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA certifications. To toggle it off, just go to Settings > Data & Privacy > Context awareness.

My co-founder Alex said it well: the product is better because it's cloud-first. That's the tradeoff, and it's fine. Honestly, that's where I land too.

In the AI era, a lot of tools need context to do their job. Littlebird, which we also use, see's what's happening on your screen at all times. That's the whole product.

Finally, what I'd argue is that because Wispr Flow had the privacy incident and responded to it publicly, they've probably been more careful about this than most tools in the category that haven't been called out yet. If you're going to try a voice dictation tool, the one that already had to fix its privacy practices is a reasonable place to start.

If you work in healthcare or law and handle genuinely sensitive material, turn context awareness off and sign the HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA). But otherwise, just go ahead and use it.