Wispr Flow

So what's different about Wispr Flow? Your phone already does dictation, after all. But it types exactly what you say, every "um" and every restart, and then you fix it by hand.

Flow tidies up as it goes. Say "send it tuesday, no wait, wednesday" and you get "Send it Wednesday." It puts in the commas and full stops, and sets out lists and paragraphs for you.

It works wherever your cursor is. Email, Slack, Notion, a terminal, a chat with an AI. There's no plugin to install for each one.

It learns your words as well. Your colleague Siobhan, your company's odd product names, that acronym nobody else uses. Add them yourself, or let it pick them up when you correct a spelling.

Then there are snippets. Say a short phrase like "my calendar link" and it drops in the whole thing.

And on Mac and Windows there's a Notetaker that writes up your meetings with no bot joining the call. It's part of the free plan too, with a weekly limit.

Everything you say goes to Wispr's servers. Its own data page says transcription always happens in the cloud. So no signal, no dictation.

And if you'd rather your voice never left your laptop, this isn't your app. Superwhisper does that part for free.

To be fair, Wispr gives you switches. You can stop your audio being used to train its models, and it says audio is deleted once it's transcribed unless you turn cloud storage on. There's also a setting that reads a little text from the app you're in to get names right, and you can turn that off too.

The iPhone app is the fiddly part. It's a keyboard you switch to, and App Store reviewers grumble about hopping between keyboards to fix a word or add an emoji. A few say long dictations got lost, or sat on "processing" and then failed.

AirPods don't help. Wispr itself says to avoid Bluetooth earbuds for dictation, because they squash the audio.

And there's no Linux app, and no Notetaker on phones yet.

Start free. You get 2,000 words a week on your computer and 1,000 on your phone, with no card. The help centre says the phone slows down at 1,000 and stops at 1,500, and it all resets on Sunday.

Is 2,000 words a lot? It's around eight longish emails. Fine for a few messages a day. Gone by Tuesday if you dictate everything.

Pro takes the limits off. It's $12 a month on yearly billing, or $15 month to month. Yearly saves 20%.

Growth is for companies that want single sign-on and HIPAA rules switched on for everyone. That's $18 a person on yearly billing, or $23 monthly. Enterprise is a custom price.

Students and teachers get 50% off Pro with an education email. The student page puts that at $6 a month billed yearly. Wispr's own pages don't quite agree on the student deal, though, so check what the app offers you before you pay.

Nonprofits can ask for a discount as well.

Wispr Flow has 4.84 on the App Store from about 16,900 ratings, and more than nine in ten of them are five stars.

What do people say? That it's the first dictation they didn't have to clean up afterwards. Several compare it with Apple's built-in dictation and say it isn't close. One reviewer with a tremor in their hands says it's been well worth paying for.

On Hacker News it's the app other dictation tools get measured against. Developers talk to it all day to write prompts for coding tools. One said they stayed on the free plan for ages before the limit ever got in their way.

The pushback there is different. It's about the cloud, and about paying monthly. Plenty of commenters have built or switched to something that runs on their own machine, and a few say it's nearly as good.

And one App Store reviewer had a fair moan about marketing. It's a keyboard, they said, so stop sending emails and notifications about your other features.