Voice as the universal interface: Willow's CTO on owning the ASR-to-LLM stack
Key points
Key takeaways from theCUBE interview with Willow Voice CTO Lawrence Liu (September 2026):
A few hundred thousand users. Willow Voice is an AI voice dictation application used by a few hundred thousand people, letting them dictate into Codeex, Claude, Gmail, Slack, or any text box on their computer.
Two core uses. Users employ Willow to prompt agents — accurate dictation with a low word-error rate, so what you say is exactly what comes out — and to compose communications: Willowscribe turns top-of-mind speech into polished messages, adapting to the user's tone and prior edits.
The secret sauce. Willow fine-tunes its own ASR model for very quiet, real-world audio — coffee shops, whispered dictation — plus a small LLM that post-processes speech into exactly what the user would have written, improving over time from edit history.
CoreWeave as training partner. Willow has used CoreWeave for about a year, since the company's inception, for deployed model training; CoreWeave's RL infrastructure abstracts the infrastructure away, leaving Willow to focus on eval alignment and ship checkpoints to production almost weekly.
OpenPipe's role. CoreWeave acquired OpenPipe, which moved from serverless SFT to its own reinforcement-learning methods, providing a forward-deployed team for model training and eval-alignment tasks.
Reward modelling constraints. For Willow, reward modelling is comparatively easy — transcript in, rewrite out — but cost dominates: using large frontier models as reward models could cost around $20,000 per trained model, pushing Willow toward lightweight alignment models and breaking subjective problems into objective truths.
Privacy by design. Because dictation touches sensitive situations, Willow cannot log end-user data and instead builds synthetic-data pipelines to improve its models; CoreWeave defaults everything to opt-out, trains on no customer data, keeps data in transit and stores nothing.
Lean, fast-growing startup. Willow is a lean team of around 10 people, has raised about $4 million, and is growing 30–40% month over month; its end-state vision is an experienced executive assistant for every knowledge worker that becomes the communication layer for entire organisations.
Read more: theCUBE
