Wispr talks its way to a $2 billion valuation. The company says dictation’s only the beginning

Tanay Kothari saw Iron Man when he was 10 years old. 

It was 2008 and he wasn’t entranced with Tony Stark. It was chatty computer JARVIS that captured Kothari’s imagination as the voice assistant managed Stark’s sprawling home, maintained his Iron Man suit, and solved complex engineering problems. Kothari thought this could be possible in our universe, not just Marvel, at the time hacking together an early voice assistant. Years later, talking to Stanford classmate Sahaj Garg, he hadn’t let it go.

“When Sahaj and I were talking about the biggest problems we wanted to solve, one of the things that came up was what it means to have a world where AI is prevalent,” said Kothari. “What does interacting with technology look and feel like? It brought me back to when I wanted to build JARVIS. It’s less about what it looks like in the movies and more about a system that just gets you. It’s with you 24/7 and you trust it to do things on your behalf. It seemed like we’d gotten to the point where it was both technically possible and the world might be ready.”

Kothari and Garg—who met in a Stanford freshman dorm on their very first day of college—cofounded dictation and voice AI startup Wispr in 2021. And for a while, they wandered the entrepreneurship wilderness, focusing on wearables that never quite clicked and “silent speech,” an interface that allows computer control without audible sounds. Then, about two years ago, they landed on the product that sent their startup (and their lives) in a new direction: dictation software app........

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