#63 - Meet the Start-Up at the Center of the Voice-Computer Revolution

Do you prefer whispering over typing? Then listen up.

The thing that makes Flow very unique as compared to other voice dictation tools that have come up in the past— every other tool tries to write everything that you say word for word, which is not what you want. You speak very differently than you write. Build what was one of the world's first voice assistants. This is before Siri, Alexa, any of those. And to people, it just felt like magic. You can break through the standard limitations of just human-computer interaction.

New version of a keyboard that doesn't require a keyboard, basically. So yeah, using— just using your voice. That's cool.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to this episode of The Tech Optimist. We have another Meet the Startup episode for you today, and the startup that we talked to today is Whisper. So behind the plate with an AV jersey on is Naren Ramaswamy, Senior Principal here on the Alumni Ventures team. And then our guest today is Sinead Kothari. He's the co-founder and CEO of Whisperflow. And then you guys all recognize me, you know my voice. My name is Sam. I'm the guide and editor for this show. So honestly, when it comes to introing this episode, I don't have much to intro because Naren did it for me. So I'm going to sort of cut the chase here. Um, and get us right into the episode. So sit back, relax. We so, so hope you enjoy this episode, and you will be hearing from me in a few minutes. So don't go anywhere and enjoy. As a reminder, the Tech Optimist podcast is for informational purposes only. It is not personalized advice, and it is not an offer to buy or sell securities. For additional important details, please see the text description accompanying this episode.

Hi everyone. Welcome to this episode of The Tech Optimist, a podcast hosted by Alumni Ventures. My name is Naren Ramaswamy. I'm a senior principal at the firm. Today we're excited to chat with Tanay Kothari, the CEO of portfolio company Whisper AI. Before we begin, a brief background on Whisper. Whisper is redefining how we interact with technology using our voice. The company has launched a new platform called Flow, which is a smart voice dictation platform using AI. The platform uses context from your screen as well as AI algorithms to create a much more efficient way to interface with your computer, since our speech is 3 times faster than our thumbs typing into a keyboard. In this chat with Tanay, we're going to chat about how Whisper is blurring the human-machine interface, as well as what he's seeing in the AI space and what the future of voice technology looks like. Hope you enjoy it.

All right, Naren set us up perfectly for this episode. I'm gonna take the baton here for a few seconds, um, and sort of get everyone on the same page about, uh, Whisper Flow and, you know, get everyone on the same page about, um, what they do as a company, their values and everything before we hop into the conversation with Narayanan tonight. Because I think, you know, it's just powerful to know what the company is doing, what their values are before we hear from them, right? Kind of let their work sort of speak for itself. So, um, This is right on their about page, right on their website. I did the dive so you don't have to, and I'm just going to read it to you. So, building voice intelligence that understands you. We are a team of designers, AI researchers, and engineers who step away from the status quo to rethink the fundamental layer of computing: how humans interact with technology. We want to craft voice interfaces that are both useful so you trust them and ubiquitous so you can use them everywhere. For us, it's the only way we move from screen-first technologies to voice-first experiences and create the future where we aren't stuck looking at screens all day. Our first product, Flow, makes voice dictation delightful. We focus on the biggest use case for technology, letting people communicate with others, their thoughts, and AI. Over the last few months, Flow became the first consumer voice dictation platform that makes people want to use voice more than their keyboards. And we're just getting started. We care about designing with incredible attention to detail. We care about building intelligence that mimics humans. We care about building experiences that feel intuitive. We care about building software that seamlessly fits into your life, and we care about building magic. If this excites you, we'd love to work with you. All right, let's hop in.

So with that introduction out of the way, let's jump in. Dhanyat, thank you for joining us today.

Naren, thanks for having me.

That's great. I, I, uh, you know, you've had a really interesting background in linguistics and computer science. Uh, could you start with a little bit of that background and how it led you to founding Whisper?

Yeah, of course. So I started building in this space about 15 years ago, back when the first Iron Man movie came out. 'Cause I wanted to build Jarvis. And then me and a buddy of mine back in the day built what was one of the world's first voice assistants. This is before Siri, Alexa, any of those. And to people it just felt like magic. I think at its peak we had about 2.5 million users and then we got shut down, which is a story for another time. But to me, what always drove me to this space was When I thought about how we interact with technology, it just felt very mechanical and cold. And given that it was gonna be a much bigger part of our lives, I just wanted to make interaction with technology feel just as natural as interacting with other people, which is where all of this came out from. And then after that, my love for just languages grew. I was, I was part of the Linguistics Olympia team. from India side, which was honestly less to do with this, more so that it was just entertaining. It was fun problems to solve, and that's just something I enjoy doing in my free time.

That's awesome. And how did the, you know, and then you spent some time at Stanford studying computer science. When did you have the vision for something like Whisper, and how did that evolve over time?

It's honestly been the exact same vision from the last 15 years. Which is how do you make technology feel something that just fades into the background so you can focus on being more present? And that to me is a very unique part of voice interfaces in general. When you, when you think about the current technology interfaces, they're all screen first, which means you have to always be distracted from somebody. Looking like this. And if you have voice interfaces that are both useful, so you trust them, and ubiquitous, so you can use them everywhere, that's the only way I imagine that we can step away from this world of screens and actually make technologies feel more seamless, uh, and make it work for us rather than us working for them.

Yeah, I think that's a, that's a fascinating vision. And I know you talk a lot about efficiency as it relates to today's technology. We use our thumbs to type into a keyboard and, but our brain is actually processing thoughts much faster than that. Yeah. And, you know, I'd love for you to educate our listeners a little bit about the productivity lost as a result of that and, and what, what opportunity you see there and, and how how something like Whisper can actually become a breakthrough technology in terms of productivity?

Yeah, for sure. So the average person types at about 40 words per minute. Less than 1% of the people in the world type faster than 80 words per minute. And the fastest typers, somewhere around 130, 140 is where they cap out. If you think about how fast we speak, On average, it's about 120 to 140 words per minute, which is already 3 to 4 times faster than how fast you could type. And when you're thinking in your mind, your brain runs even faster than that. So overall, if you see what happens when you're trying to do any sort of work, you know in your mind what you wanna say, what you wanna write, and then your biggest bottleneck are your fingers. as they move over keyboards, which are this archaic piece of technology that have existed since the 1800s. And we still use them because nothing else has worked as reliably yet. And what ends up happening, and this is what we clearly see when we've given Flow to our users, is you just don't realize how much of your time and how much of your mental bandwidth goes into making sure things are formatted well, that there are no typos, that you're putting the full stops in the right places.

More on Flow's technology right after this.

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Versus if you can just let your thoughts flow, you get a lot more out, lets you be way more creative, and it removes that bottleneck that we have, right, of just the keyboards reducing our typing speed. So What we eventually found is people on average with Flow are just outputting at 120 words per minute on average. Some people go above 200, even 250 words per minute, which we think is like unfeasible to do with a standard keyboard. And once they start doing this for everything on the work side, so we're talking like sending emails, Slack messages, writing long documents, The productivity gains just compound. And what it looks like in terms of the actual output is, as a manager, you're just way more responsive to your team. If you're doing customer support or sales, you're reaching out to a lot more people. If you're a developer who's, you know, as we all do, using ChatGPT or Claude or Cursor to get your work done, you could just be now so much faster. and just produce more. And at the heart of it, you can break through the standard limitations of just human-computer interaction.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a new paradigm with how we communicate with technology. And so just for our listeners to back up a little bit, I know you mentioned Flow. We haven't actually introduced Flow to the listeners yet. I know that that's your new product, but could you just share a little bit with the audience about what is Flow? How does it work? And, uh, I know that you're about to do a public launch, so maybe, uh, share more on that.

Oh yeah, of course. So Flow is super simple. You speak and it writes for you in every application in your style. Our first product is a Mac app that runs in the background. You just hold down a key, speak naturally, And Flow understands where you are, what you're trying to do, and it writes the messages as you would have written them. And so the thing that makes Flow very unique as compared to other voice dictation tools that have come up in the past is every other tool tries to write everything that you say word for word, which is not what you want. You speak very differently than you write. And the second thing is these all systems optimize for the completely wrong metric. If you're technical, most speech recognition systems, they try to make the word error rates really low, but that's a technical metric. That is not what matters to the end user. The metric we care about is the percentage of zero-edit messages, which is of all the messages that you write with Flow, How often do you have to go and edit something and fix it before you send it? With Apple Dictation or Google or OpenAI's Whisper, that number is actually about 5%. Only 5% of messages are ones that are ready to send. With Flow, that shoots up to 50 to 70% depending on where you are, which is what is the biggest differentiator that is just primarily driven by us rethinking about what we wanted Flow to do.

That's fascinating. Thanks for sharing. And what's the core technology that powers this, you know, underlying the voice interface? And, you know, what, what makes Flow unique compared to existing solutions in the space?

The, the biggest part is We wanna make Flow, and then I'll start off with the underlying reason on how we think about it, which will make it very obvious on why it's architected this way. We just want Flow to do 2 things really well. The first one is we want users to trust Flow. And second is we want users to feel understood by Flow. So what that looks like is So say I'm sending you a message like, hey Naren, let's meet at 5 o'clock. Actually, you know what, let's do, let's do 6 PM. Standard dictation system would just write all of this word for word. Flow would write, hey Naren, let's meet at 6 PM, which actually when a user sees that, they think that Flow is competent. They think that, oh, I can make mistakes and it'll be fine 'cause I can go correct them with Flow. And that drives a lot of trust. And underlying it is a set of models that we put together internally at the Whisper office, which has a number of sections around personalization, understanding the context, reducing hallucinations, around making you sound more concise, have a reasoning engine that can understand if there's something you're saying as a command, which is like, actually let's make that 6:00 PM versus things that you just wanna, is like are parts of your message. And at the core of it, what we started to realize is people think about Flow just as another person and they have the same expectations of it. If you look at Slack, for example, like Slack is a tool of Slack, A bug happens like, oh, Slack bugged out. If Flow makes a mistake, people say, oh, Flow didn't understand me, and oh, Flow didn't remember this. And because people have human-like expectations from Flow, everything that we do under the hood to architect the system are to match what human expectations would be like if Flow was a person.

All right, y'all, here in a few seconds you're gonna hear a video demo of Flow that Whisper has put together. It is awesome. It's like really cool and witty, and it's a really cool video. So, uh, to see the visuals, of course, hop over to our YouTube channel. Uh, but, uh, you know, just if you're here hanging out with us on audio, you will just get the audio version. So, so hang tight.

And here's how.

Hey, Saj, you know, meet at 5 o'clock? Or actually, you know what, let's do, let's do 6 PM. Yo, that's sick. Fire emoji. Hey, Alyssa, here's 3 things that make Flow unique. It gets names right, even uncommon ones like yours. It lets you edit, especially if you change your mind while speaking, and it formats your messages just like you would. And when you're around other people, you can even whisper. Plus, you can use Flow commands to use AI wherever you're working. Flow, let's actually make this for our Spanish-speaking audience. Most Flow users actually use Flow more than their keyboards. Don't believe me? Go to flowwise.ai to try it for yourself and download the app to use it everywhere. Cheers!

For those creative types like myself with very personal speaking styles, this is a godsend. I'm glad to see the launch of Flow today. This is what computers were meant to do for people.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the blur between humans and machines are getting more and more, uh, there's, there's just the distance between the two of them is, you know, through these sort of platforms is going to reduce and, and, uh, You know, that's sort of a sneak peek into what the future is going to look like. But bringing it back to the present, I know that you guys in the Whisper office, all of your employees use Flow regularly. I think every email that I send you, I get a response from you that is written in Flow. So for our audience, would you be able to share what are some of the common use cases and applications that, you know, for, for which They use the platform?

Yeah, of course. So one of the ones that's really taking up right now is everybody who uses Cursor is switching over to using Flow with it. And this is primarily to, to write code, build products. Same thing for We0, same thing for Replit, and when people are programming agents. So as engineers, they're often early adopters of technology and everything that they have to do is now more natural language driven. And for that, Flow is their default go-to. Other use cases are a lot of our users are often highly ambitious people whose jobs involve a lot of communication. This can be with your team on Slack or other messaging platforms. This can be external to your company if you're messaging clients, potential customers, and so on. Like I use it to do all of our customer support, all of my investor communications. I use it on Slack all day to respond to my entire team. And those 2, I would say, are the biggest 2 use cases. What we've also seen come up is when people are interacting with AI agents like ChatGPT or Claude, what we've seen happen is If you're typing, you try to write the shortest query possible that explains your problem. It's like toilet broken, how fix? It's like what you also put into Google, right? But if you can speak, you're like, hey, my toilet is broken. Actually, like when I pull the flush, like it doesn't actually like properly flush and like whatever. You can go on a rant for 30 seconds. It's gonna take you the same amount of time, but now the system has so much more context and it gives you better results. Which is what you really want. And this is something that we're still understanding why people like using it more than they do ChatGPT Voice and other voice interfaces that these products are building into it. Part to do with how we think about the whole interface in general, but also part of the fact that it just builds a habit and people start using it in one application and then slowly they're like, why do I use my keyboard for anything at all? And we slowly see people using Flow more than their keyboards in terms of just how much they output during the day.

Yeah, it's the new, new version of a keyboard that doesn't require a keyboard, basically. So yeah, using, just using your voice. That's cool. Moving to sort of, you know, with, with AI tools like this, there's always a conversation around Privacy and security of data.

Yeah.

What's, what's your stance on that? And, and curious how you're tackling that.

Yeah, great question. So this is something that is very front and center for the entire product. People use Flow for their most sensitive messages, whether it's to their loved ones or to their team professionally, or for all of the personal journaling notes and thoughts that they have. And so by default, all your data stays locally on your computer. No one else can access it but you. We don't save anything on our servers. Most AI tools today are privacy, privacy-wise is like, or I'll rephrase, most AI tools today are data sharing opt-out. So they opt you in by default and then you can go and turn it off later on. And a lot of people just don't know about it. So users just aren't educated well. Flow is by default data sharing is off. You can turn it on, it'll help us improve our models more, but by default it's not. And that is one of the things that has helped us build a lot of trust with all our early users and actually let them use the product for every single thing that they want to do without having to think twice. Um, now this does raise a question on If we're not collecting all of this data, how do we make our models better? There's a, there's a few things that we have for that, and parts of it also include federated learning that is privacy-preserving, completely anonymous that we do. But for most part, question is, how do we use just the, the context that we have locally on a person's computer to give them the best personalized experience?

Yeah, that's fascinating. What, you know, let's, thanks for going into the details around Flow. Um, just let's zoom out a little bit and talk about the AI space and love to get your thoughts. Uh, you know, the jury is still out on how, uh, AI is going to transform our lives. And, uh, there's a lot of tools in the enterprise. Uh, there's tools in consumer. What, what are some of the challenges that you are seeing as an AI company, uh, today?

I'd say a big one that is coming up is fundamentally right now when people are talking about generative AI, the standard conversation is around large language models and the way they're architected. Now, LLMs are fundamentally non-deterministic. Which is great because they have a chance to be creative, they have a chance to reason, they have a chance to do a lot of different emergent behaviors. But their non-determinism means that you can't use it for tasks that need to be 100% accurate. They are pretty much like humans in that way. And what the implications of this are Oftentimes companies are trying to replace everything that they do or different problem spaces with an AI-only solution instead of how they should be thinking about it as an AI-first solution. For example, if you are doing something for accounting, would you rather just rather have a smart person just do it on a piece of paper or would you want to give them a calculator as well. And this is, I think, a fundamental, I'd say, idea that is missed out by a lot of people, which is when you're building AI-based solutions, that just doesn't have to be the only thing in it. You need to back it up with a lot of business logic, with a lot of heuristics and algorithms that you develop yourself and use the LLM part of it for what it does really well, which is reasoning and creativity and knowledge about the world, and put those 2 systems together. And I think this is one thing that I hope is gonna emerge more and more over the next couple of years for us to be able to build even more powerful solutions because non-determinism just means that for a lot of business use cases, People just are not adopting these large language models as much as they would have otherwise if there were more guarantees that it's just not gonna hallucinate randomly one day or write an extra zero in one of your invoices.

And you know that you hit the nail on the head. I think for me, that gets me excited as a VC because there's tremendous potential for this technology, but You know, widespread adoption will require this determinism. This, this, in the enterprise, you can't afford to make those kinds of mistakes often. And so what new tools can help AI tools be deterministic? Because not every company is a Whisper AI where you have AI engineers on your team that can build those systems internally. So definitely an exciting opportunity for us as well. as we continue to look for startups. Just to close out, I think what's— tell us a little bit more about your public launch. How can users try Flow and anything that you'd wanna leave with the users before we close out?

Yeah, of course. So, so far Flow, the biggest complaint that our users have had is that it is only available on Macs and people can't feel the, the flows, like people can't feel the magic of Flow on their phones or other laptops that they might have. So one of the big things that we're launching is actually a web version of Flow that you can go and try it out. It'll be on our website, flowvoice.ai. And once you go there, you can try it out. You can see how fast you are when you speak, and you can also then just download the application directly and get started. We're gonna have a launch promo for all of the users who are gonna sign up in the first 2 weeks of October, giving them 3 months off on our annual plan. So if you want that, the code is gonna be PHLAUNCHDAY, and you can just add that in and you should be ready to go.

That's awesome. Cool. Thanks a lot, Tanay. Really excited about what you guys are building. And as, as someone who's had the chance to try Flow and use it in some of my daily tasks, I, you know, I do think that the old technology of keyboards and, and the graphical user interface from several decades ago is, is going to be transformed in an AI era, and you guys are one of the pioneers in the space. So really excited about what you're building.

Thank you. Always love hearing from happy users.

That's great. Well, thanks a lot. And, um, yeah, good luck.

Thank you.

That was our podcast with Tanay Kothari, the CEO of Whisper AI. Hope you enjoyed it. For those of you who are interested If you're interested in learning more about becoming an investor in our deep tech fund, I encourage you to view the fund materials or just book time with our team. You can learn more at av.vc/funds/deep-tech. We're actively raising our 5th fund and just completed our first investment from that fund, which was into Groq, which is a pioneering AI chip company. By investing in the fund, you'll have exposure to that company. Thank you for tuning in, and we hope you enjoyed the discussion.

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