In the last few years, AI-powered dictation tools have taken off. In addition to existing dictation apps like Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, Willow, and Monologue, new ones are being launched every week. On Thursday, hardware company Nothing launched a competitive product of its own, called Essential Voice.
The core idea is similar to other dictation apps, as Essential Voice works in any app to turn your speech into formatted text, removing filler words like “um” and “ah” along the way. The company said that you can also create custom voice shortcuts for words, links, templates, and repeated phrases. For instance, you can assign the “my address” shortcut to your full address.
At the moment, the feature is available on the Phone (3) with rollout for Phone (4a) Pro planned for later this month, and support for Phone (4a) arriving next month.
To access the feature, users either press the Essential key on devices where it is present or activate it from the keyboard. The feature is similar to the one that Superwhisper released earlier this week for iPhone users, which allows them to map the iPhone’s action key to the app’s keyboard for dictation.
Nothing’s new tool can also translate text directly from one language to another. At launch, Nothing said the feature supports over 100 languages. Going forward, it will also introduce app-based custom styling, meaning you’ll be able to change the tone of the AI editing within app categories, like work and messaging.
Nothing is one of the first companies to offer a system-level integration for dictation. However, based on Google’s recent release of its offline dictation app, we might see more companies release similar tools in the future.