Cohere is partnering with fellow AI startup Superwhisper to have its transcription model power the Toronto startup’s voice-to-text dictation.
The news: The two companies announced on Wednesday that Cohere’s Transcribe model will now be among the AI models available on Superwhisper’s dictation app. The app allows users to compose emails, messages, and instructions for AI agents just by speaking.
The partnership creates an all-Canadian platform for dictation that can be run locally on users’ laptops or phones, Superwhisper said. That means data wouldn’t be sent to a foreign-owned cloud. Cohere’s model will eventually be made the baseline local model on Superwhisper, rather than the current baseline: Nvidia’s Parakeet.
From the source: “With dictation, there’s a little bit of a song and dance between speed and accuracy,” Superwhisper head of go-to-market Nico DiPlacido told BetaKit in an interview. “We found Cohere’s word error rate to be really good, especially with the size of the model and its ability to run locally on consumer hardware.”
Following the thread: Voice-to-text has become a more popular way to do work in front of a computer screen, particularly among developers who use voice mode to give instructions to AI coding agents. A number of voice dictation apps have gained steam over the past year, including market leader Wispr Flow, which was in talks to be valued at $2 billion USD ($2.8 billion CAD).
Voice dictation fits with Cohere’s proposed goal of making functional AI for the workplace, rather than chasing artificial general intelligence. DiPlacido said Superwhisper will also integrate with Cohere’s workplace deployments, meaning that it can pull in context from a user’s work data when crafting a dictated email, for example.
Final thought: DiPlacido said Superwhisper started as a consumer-focused product, with 80 to 90 percent of its revenue from individual users. Now, 40 percent of its revenue comes from enterprise plans, and this Cohere partnership is a way of getting its product in front of more people at the enterprise level. He said that the company is planning an expansion of its meeting mode feature, which would compete with meeting assistant apps like Granola and Fellow.ai, but run locally.
Feature image courtesy Superwhisper.
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