Gee whiz, Gboard: You’re really falling behind.
For all the many ways Google’s Gboard keyboard makes tapping out text a breeze on Android, its ability to transcribe your speech and turn it into words isn’t exactly awe-inspiring.
Android’s voice-to-text setup has always been pretty good, relatively speaking—but now, newer and more effective options are popping up, and it’s suddenly seeming like a system from the past.
Last month, I introduced readers of my Android Intelligence newsletter to a new Android voice typing tool called Typeless that blows Gboard out of the water with its ability to actually understand what you’re saying and transform it into accurate, neatly formatted, and impressively cleaned-up text.
This week, another new contender has come along that’s a step better yet.
Lemme show ya how.
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Android dictation, reinvented—again
Our new Android voice typing champion is an app that has been available on other platforms for a while now and that just became available on Android this week.
➜ It’s called Wispr Flow, and no exaggeration: It is the Android dictation upgrade you never knew you needed (even if its own name is annoyingly difficult to type!).
Its Android presence is especially inspiring, too—thanks to the way it works seamlessly right alongside whatever regular keyboard you’re using, in a way that only Android allows.
⌚ And it’ll take you all of two minutes to get up and running with it.
First, the basics: Like Typeless before it, Wispr Flow lets you simply speak aloud and say whatever you want—without worrying about getting everything exactly right. You can stop and start, correct yourself as you go, and even include as many “ums,” “erms,” and “y’knows” as needed, and it’ll figure out what you’re trying to say and put it into proper form for you.
It is light-years ahead of what Gboard or any other traditional Android keyboard app can accomplish. And compared to Typeless (as well as any voice typing experience on, ahem, other mobile operating systems), the reason it’s superior is because of the way it works as a supplement to any standard Android keyboard—Gboard or otherwise—you like to use for manual text entry.
Typeless, y’see, requires you to select it as your active Android keyboard in order for it to work. That means you have to switch away from Gboard (or whatever else you’re using) over to it when you want to dictate, then switch back when you’re done. It isn’t unmanageable, but it’s absolutely awkward and an unfortunate bit of extra friction.
Wispr Flow, in contrast, works by adding a floating bubble above your regular Android keyboard whenever the keyboard is visible. If you want to type by tapping or swiping, you just ignore it. But if you want to dictate text, instead of tapping the microphone icon on your actual keyboard, you tap the Wispr Flow button and start talking.
And, again, Wispr Flow just gets it right. It is consistently so much better than the standard Gboard/Android voice input, it’ll blow your mind.
In addition to tapping the Wispr Flow icon, you’ve got the option to press and hold the button. That way, you can talk and then just let go when you’re finished instead of having to make a second tap to tell it you’re done.
Either way, though, you never end up having the system stop listening and cut you off before you’re finished, while you’re just pausing to think for a moment—as Gboard and the standard Android voice input methods often do.
The finer points of (Wispr) Flowing
My only two gripes with Wispr Flow on Android are:
- The floating bubble icon occasionally sticks around a little longer than it should. In theory, it’s supposed to disappear as soon as your keyboard goes away—but every now and then, it doesn’t quite take the hint and ends up staying on-screen even after the keyboard is no longer visible. (When that happens, you can always press and hold it and drag it down to the bottom of the screen to dismiss it, though.)
- The bubble can also sometimes be slightly annoying, even when the keyboard is present and it’s supposed to be there—as it ends up appearing over text or other elements on the screen that you actually want to see. In such scenarios, you can either press and hold it to drag it to another spot, or press and hold it to dismiss it temporarily, so it really isn’t a major issue and is more of just a minor once-in-a-while pest.
Wispr Flow also doesn’t format things quite as dramatically as Typeless—with automatically created bulleted or numbered lists, when appropriate—nor does it change and rewrite your words quite as aggressively. Whether that’s an upside or a downside is relative to your own personal preferences.
But by and large, its interface is so much smarter and easier to use that it’s a no-brainer as the preferable all-around option and the best Android voice typing supertool available at this moment.
As far as cost goes, Wispr Flow is completely free on Android—for now. That almost certainly will change eventually. The service’s standard pricing model is pretty similar to Typeless’s, with a limited free path (up to 1,000 dictated words a week) and the option to upgrade to a $144/year Pro plan that gives you unlimited use on all platforms, including in the desktop domain (with its equivalent native app on a Windows or Mac computer).
And last but not least, for the ever-important asterisk of privacy: When you first set it up, Wispr Flow gives you the option to either allow your audio to be used for future model training or to keep it completely private. Provided you pick the privacy path, the company says your data will never be stored, shared, or used for any purpose.
If you spend any amount of time talking into your phone, this is an app well worth your while to try. And even if you don’t, you might just be surprised by how much it changes your perspective on on-the-go dictation as a result of how easy and effective it makes it—and how much that in turn encourages you to talk instead of tapping to take advantage of its top-notch transcribing talents.
It’s absolutely had that effect on me already. And that’s quite a feat for a guy who’s long been determined to avoid talking to technology.
- Wispr Flow’s new Android app is available in the Google Play Store.
- It’s completely free to use for now, with a freemium model likely coming into effect at some point in the future.
- Its creator promises not to store your data or use it for any manner of training as long as you opt out of that during the initial setup.
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