Relay, a London startup started by two former employees of the phone maker Nothing, launched its voice dictation software today. Cookie Xu was Nothing's head of AI and services, and Raymond Zhu worked as a hardware product manager there. The two built Relay after struggling with a simple office problem: talking loud enough for their laptop microphone to hear them, without being so loud that a coworker sitting next to them could hear every word.
The software runs on Mac for now, using Google's Gemini models to turn speech into text anywhere you can type. It goes further than plain dictation too: ask it to message a colleague on Slack or set up a meeting on Google Calendar, and it will open the app, find the right person, and do it. A dedicated microphone called the Relay Q arrives in early 2027, priced at $150 with a year of the software included, then $15 a month afterward.
This is landing in a market that has stopped being a niche experiment. Wispr Flow, a competing dictation app, just raised money at a valuation of $2 billion, with usage growing across most large companies in the country. That is a strong signal that talking to your computer instead of typing has moved from a personal habit into something businesses are already paying for, whether their IT department knows about it or not.
Hardware competitors are ahead on timing. Rings from two other startups are already in customers' hands, aimed at the exact same idea of a quiet, private way to talk to your devices. Relay chose a handheld gadget over a ring, but it will not have a physical product to sell for well over a year, giving rivals a real head start with anyone who wants dedicated hardware now.
The part business owners should pay attention to is not the microphone. It is the permission Relay asks for: to draft messages or book meetings, the app needs to see your screen, not just hear your voice. That is the same category of access that got Microsoft's screen-recording feature, Recall, criticized hard by security researchers before it reached most users.
None of this means Relay is unsafe. The company says it processes data locally and does not keep a copy on its own servers. But any manager whose team starts using voice tools like this should know what data leaves the laptop, where it goes, and who can see it, before assuming it is just a faster way to write an email.
For most companies, the real decision is not whether to buy Relay. It is whether to write a simple rule now for what voice and screen-reading apps employees are allowed to install, before someone in the office does it on their own.