Apps & Consumer
Granola adds dictation, pushing further into Wispr's turf
Granola, the meeting-notetaking app, has launched a dictation feature for Mac that works across other apps, months after dictation specialist Wispr added its own meeting notetaker.
Consumer voice-AI apps keep converging on each other’s core features, and Granola’s new dictation tool is the latest example. On Mac, users press the “Fn” key, speak, and Granola cleans up and formats the resulting text — a feature that works across apps, so people can use it to write notes, dictate prompts, or reply to emails and messages. The company says the feature is coming to iOS and Windows soon.
Granola and Wispr occupy opposite ends of the same niche: Granola built its business on automating meeting notes, while Wispr has focused on dictation and is building its own models through a research lab exploring new human-computer interfaces. The two are valued at $1.5 billion and $2 billion, respectively.
The overlap isn’t limited to these two. Voice startups including Fireflies, Speechify and Monologue have also folded meeting notetaking and dictation into single, multifeature products. Earlier this year the prevailing approach was a narrowly focused app that did one thing well; now these companies are each trying to extract more value from the same underlying skill — capturing what users say.
Why it matters
As dictation and meeting notes merge into one product category, voice-AI startups are racing to own the full surface of how people turn speech into text, raising the stakes for any one of them that stays narrowly focused.