In recent years, AI dictation tools have taken off. In addition to existing dictation apps such as Wispr Flow, SuperWhisper, Willow and Monolouge, new these released every week. On Thursday, hardware company Nothing unveiled a competing product of its own, called Essential Voice.
The basic idea is similar to other dictation apps, in that 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 you can also create custom voice shortcuts for words, links, patterns and repeated phrases. For example, you can map the shortcut “my address” to your full address.
The feature is currently available on Phone (3) with a planned release for Phone (4a) Pro later this month and support for Phone (4a) arriving next month.
To access the feature, users either press the Home key on devices where it exists or activate it from the keyboard. The feature is similar to that which Superwhisper was 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 more than 100 languages. In the future, it will also introduce app-based custom styling, meaning you’ll be able to change the tone of AI processing within app categories like work and messages.
Nothing is one of the first companies to offer system-level integration for indication. However, based on Google’s recent launch of its offline dictation app, we may see more companies release similar tools in the future.
