WOW, seriously have never encountered such a shady app or business ever (even though the product is great at what it does). The Wispr Team deactivated my Slack account on their workspace after asking polite and totally fair questions there in my mind. SERIOUSLY shady inner working in this app BEWARE. And RED FLAG how they treat their users.
My post on Slack before they banned me on their Slack (oh and I also said that I was going to uninstall because I realized after removing it from login items, because I was done with it for a while, only to realize THAT IT WILL INJECT ITSELF INTO YOUR LOGIN ITEMS AGAIN SOMEHOW ON LOGIN SO YOU LITERALLY CAN'T GET RID OF THE APP UNLESS YOU NUKE IT WITH APPCLEANER.
"Hey Wispr team,
I've been using Flow for a while now, and I've got to say, the functionality is impressive. However, I have several concerns:
1. System Integration:
The app for some reason ruins my right-click context menu in Firefox. Extension options in right-click context menus disappear on hover. I spent hours troubleshooting, even ended up nuking my Firefox setup, only to find out Flow was the culprit. What is it doing in Firefox anyway?
Suddenly, I'm seeing the Wispr Flow logo in my Chrome address bar. I don't remember enabling this, and there seems to be no way to turn this off?
The app adds itself to login items every time it's launched. This is not standard behavior and feels intrusive.
2. Resource Usage:
The app is a whopping 800MB, which feels kind of big for a dictation tool?
It's constantly using about 8% CPU, even when idle. What's it doing in the background?
Launch time is around 10 seconds with quirky loading messages. What's really happening during this "setup"?
3. Deep Integration and Privacy Concerns:
The onboarding checklist actually tracks actions across apps. It knew when I used Discord, ChatGPT, mail and other apps which I don't remember 100%. This level of system awareness is alarming.
Your promo video shows the app using context to correctly spell unusual names in emails. How exactly is this context gathered? Does it capture my screen or what?
4. Transparency Issues:
Your privacy policy is vague and broad. It doesn't provide clear limits on data use or specific explanations of what data is collected in different scenarios.
The policy mentions using customer content to train AI models. Does this include my dictations and the context you gather?
There's no clear documentation about the app's system interactions or the full extent of its capabilities.
5. Browser Integration:
The Chrome and Firefox integrations appeared without clear user consent or easy ways to disable them.
What exactly are these browser integrations doing? Are they monitoring my web activity?
6. Data Collection and Usage:
Given the app's deep integration and context awareness, what exactly are you collecting?
How is this data being used beyond the immediate dictation functionality?
Are you sharing this data with third parties? If so, with whom and for what purposes?
7. User Control:
There seems to be a lack of granular controls for the app's various integrations and features.
How can users opt out of specific data collection or feature integrations?
How can users opt out of injections into certain apps? Shouldn't it be opt-in?
8. Security Concerns:
With such deep system access, what security measures are in place to protect user data?
How are you safeguarding against potential misuse of the app's extensive permissions?
Don't get me wrong - the core functionality of Flow is impressive. The dictation accuracy, speed, and cross-app functionality are genuinely useful. But right now, using Flow feels like I've given an unknown entity unfettered access to my digital life. Given these concerns, I'm hesitant about becoming a paid subscriber.
We need some real transparency here:
1. Can you provide a detailed, technical explanation of Flow's system access and integration methods?
2. What specific data are you collecting, and how exactly is it being used and protected?
3. Can we get more granular user controls over the app's various features and integrations?
4. Are there plans to optimize the app's resource usage and size?
5. How are you ensuring user privacy and security given the app's deep system access?
I want to continue using Flow, but I need to fully understand what I'm permitting on my system. Looking forward to your detailed response."
I've got some email correspondence with them and I had more questions in the Slack which went unanswered.
I've been playing with this today, and I have to say wow, this works so much better than I assumed it would. I actually use Apple's built-in dictation quite a bit, but I have to speak my punctuation and I often stop to edit which ruins my flow. I also use other voice notes apps a lot and then I'll accidentally speak the punctuation within those and I'm just confusing myself.
With this I can have one streamlined way of collecting or expressing my thoughts. I am just really loving it so far. Yes, I did write this using the app itself.
Before Flow, I didn't realize how much my keyboard got in the way. I would think about formatting, spelling, and brevity before what I actually wanted to say. Now, I focus on the content and let Flow take care of the rest. Plus it feels like less effort after a long workday.
As for the people behind the product - they are so on top of it. But I might be biased :)
I am a product manager and due to the nature of my job, ideas and mostly broken ideas are always revolving in my head. Wispr flow has helped me organize my thoughts and jot them down faster. It also helps me to communicate across various teams so much faster than my usual workflow. I feel like everyone is always sitting around me and I just say things to the right people. Fast. Flow is Fast.
Insanely accurate and scarily human. To the point where it feels like Jarvis from Ironman. I have used it to make quick edits on my documents. Simple .docx documents. Haven't done anything fancy yet but the speech to text is really good and can easily replace your writing if you prefer to speak more. There are many advanced and nifty features which look really useful for fulltime users but since I'm a 100 wpm typist, I am using this for document navigation and edits only right now. However, I am very impressed by the product and will slowly learn more about the other features since I can easily see how they would optimize my workflow to a great degree. Thanks for a competitive writing aid Wispr! Hare Krishna!
Insanely good product that's become such a core aspect of my workflow that I barely even type anymore. I would say more, but honestly you just have to try out the magic for yourself :)
I didn't know I talked so fast. I've been using it for a week and have saved myself a lot of typing. The UI/UX is surprisingly delightful, completely intuitive, it felt like second nature by the end of the first day. I almost never need to edit the transcript it creates. I didn't even type this review, I spoke it.
This is an amazing product that has greatly helped me with using my Mac. I have Parkinsons so using my hands at times can be very challenging and difficult. I highly recommend giving it a try so you can see how well it works to dictate text for you, accurately and quickly.
