Granola launched a dictation feature Thursday, moving into territory held by Wispr.
On a Mac, a user presses the Fn key, speaks, and the tool cleans up and formats the speech before inserting it into whatever app has focus. It works system-wide, so the same keystroke handles notes, prompts and email replies. The company is offering unlimited words for free, and says iOS and Windows versions are coming.
The two moves are mirror images. Granola, long the notetaker, added the dictation. Wispr, long the dictation tool, shipped a notetaker a few months back. Each company now sells what the other started with.
Both have money behind the race. Granola is valued at $1.5B and Wispr at $2B, and their strategies diverge from there. Granola stays on meeting automation and notetaking, while Wispr runs a research lab building its own models and exploring new interfaces between people and computers.
The convergence runs past these two. Fireflies, Speechify and Monologue were once narrower tools and now bundle capture and transcription of speech into one product. A year ago the strategy was to be the best single-purpose app in a category. Today the question each of them is asking is how to earn more from the same audio, because the model that writes up a meeting and the model that types an email are close cousins.
Granola’s free tier is the aggressive part. It puts pressure on a rival that charges for similar work, and it costs little if the company’s real business is the meeting archive.
