I constantly use dictation apps such as Wispr Flow, Willow, or Typeless to reply to messages and emails on both my Mac and my phone. But to do so, I have to use my phone’s mic or AirPods to dictate my messages, and they often don’t pick up what I am saying.

That’s why when Notta-owned SpeakOn pitched me to test a dedicated device for dictation, I was intrigued by its potential. Unfortunately, I had mixed experiences with the product because of its form factor and platform limitations.

Still, I think there is space for dictation devices like this in the future.

SpeakOn is a small pebble-like device that can stick on the back of your iPhone via MagSafe, just like Plaud’s AI meeting notetaker. The device is very light at 25 grams, so you won’t feel its weight, even if you put it in your pocket separately.

The device comes with a companion app on iOS, which is in the form of a keyboard, like other dictation apps. You can also use the app without connecting the device, if needed.

To get started, you press the button on the device to start dictating and release the button when you are done. The device has one mic and claims to capture audio within 2 feet of distance. The dictation works in any app as long as the software keyboard is active. The speech is automatically filtered as the app removes filler words and can format the text output as a list if needed.

One advantage is that the device does not use the iPhone’s mic and instead relies on its own mic. Other dictation apps need to keep the iPhone mic active based on the session time users have defined. The SpeakOn device can help you avoid that.

My gripe with the SpeakOn device is that, despite having dedicated mics, it doesn’t pick up the audio well — unless I bring the phone within roughly two feet of range. And even within that range, the mics often underperform because of the surrounding noise. I am hoping for better quality mics in the next version.

I also wish that double-tapping the record button could bring the SpeakOn keyboard to the fore if I were using a text keyboard. Or if I could start speaking without switching keyboards, but those are system-level limitations that are possibly hard to overcome.

The app changes AI editing and tone based on the app that you’re in, but you can also manually change that. I felt that at times, the edits were forced and unnecessary. For instance, when I said, “Does this app work automatically?”, the app converted that into, “Does this application operate automatically?” In another instance, the app turned the word “complex” into “tricky,” and turned “Sure, no worries” into “There is no need to be concerned”. I don’t want or need these kinds of edits. I eventually turned off its “attune” tone-changing feature to get better results.

I would have also used this device a lot more if it were compatible with Mac and I could dictate in any app.

Besides transcription, users can tap on the translate button to automatically translate speech into supported languages, including English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Arabic.

SpeakOn says that the device could be used for 10 hours at a stretch and has a 20-day standby time. But in my experience, standby time was only a few days rather than 20 days. By default, the device never turns off. I would suggest tweaking that setting to make the device turn off after a few hours of inactivity to save the battery.

The device can fully charge from 0 to 100 percent within an hour. But you can always plug it in for a few minutes to get enough juice for many minutes of dictation.

The device is priced at $129 with a plan that lets you dictate 5,000 words per week. Other apps like Wispr Flow typically allow for 2,000 words per week on their free plan. There’s also a $12 per month plan for unlimited words.

SpeakOn has an early mover advantage in releasing a dictation device. But it needs to expand platform support and improve the software experience, because another company could easily source components and put them in a different form factor to eat up market share.

Someone’s offering an unusual deal for a 13-acre property in Mill Valley, just north of South Francisco.

Homeowner and investment banker Storm Duncan has created a LinkedIn page for the home, which he said he’d “like to exchange […] for Anthropic equity.”

The San Francisco Standard reports that Duncan described this as a “diversification play,” as he’s “under-concentrated in AI investments relative to the importance of AI in the future, and over-concentrated in real estate,” while a young Anthropic employee might be “in the exact opposite scenario.”

Duncan is asking potential buyers to email him to discuss deal specifics, but he said it would be a private transaction that doesn’t require the buyer to sell their stock outright. On LinkedIn, he also said the homebuyer would “continue to retain 20% of the upside value of the shares exchanged for the duration of the lockup period.”

Duncan, who described himself as a longtime Bay Area resident who moved to Miami during the pandemic, bought the property in 2019 for $4.75 million. It’s currently occupied by “a high profile VC,” he said, but he declined to identify the VC.

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Tesla earnings came and went, and much of it fell into the “we expected this” category. Investors seemed surprised by the $1.4 billion in free cash flow, which gave shares a brief bump, and revenue met or slightly exceeded expectations, depending on which batch of analysts you reviewed. 

The earnings call, however, did deliver one eyebrow-raising moment that prompted readers (including some ex-Tesla engineers and other founders in the industry) to reach out to me with some schadenfreude-tinted prose. CEO Elon Musk admitted that millions of Tesla owners will need hardware upgrades to run a future, more capable version of its Full Self-Driving software that doesn’t require human supervision. 

There are financial and legal implications for Tesla. As senior reporter Sean O’Kane wrote, Tesla owners with Hardware 3 cars have spent years bugging the company and Musk for a straight answer about whether they would be able to run this advanced version of Full Self-Driving — which, it should be noted, Tesla has not yet released or even proven it is capable of releasing. Tesla sold these Hardware 3 cars between 2019 and 2023.

Now, here is the kicker and it made me guffaw. Musk said the company would need to physically upgrade each of these vehicles, a feat that would require Tesla to set up microfactories in several major cities to service potentially millions of vehicles. 

Microfactories? Yes, you heard correctly. This is not going to be cheap, and it could be one of the line items in Tesla’s capital expenditures budget, which it expanded to a whopping $25 billion this year. 

A little bird

Senior reporter Sean O’Kane obtained (and verified) an internal memo sent by Redwood Materials founder and CEO JB Straubel that announced layoffs and a restructuring. (Thanks to the little bird who shared it.) Straubel is a former CTO of Tesla.

The company laid off around 135 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as it restructures to better accommodate its growing energy storage business. O’Kane later learned several executives have also recently left. Chief operating officer Chris Lister is retiring, and at least three other VPs have left in recent months, with the company telling TechCrunch there has been a focus on reducing layers of management.

Last week, I shared that a new autonomous hauler startup (think a cabless autonomous big rig) backed by Eclipse was about to break cover and announce a seed round, thanks to a little bird. Welp, it happened just days later. 

The San Francisco-based startup, called Humble Robotics, raised $24 million in a seed round. Eclipse led the round, which also included backing by Energy Impact Partners and RedBlue Capital, a small early-stage VC firm that is surprisingly active. 

As I had been told, Humble really is chock-full of Silicon Valley elite, including founder Eyal Cohen, who previously had stints at Apple special projects, Uber ATG, Pronto, and Waabi. He also founded Spark AI, which was acquired by John Deere in 2023. 

Other execs include Drew Gray, who has a similarly AV-heavy résumé, including early days at Cruise, before jumping over to self-driving trucks startup Otto, which was acquired by Uber. After leaving Uber, he became CTO at Voyage, which was then acquired by Cruise. 

A full-circle moment, cemented by this fun fact: Humble Robotics is in the same building Cruise was in right after the startup moved out of founder Kyle Vogt’s garage. I know, we keep circling back to 2016.  

Except it’s not 2016, and Cohen and Gray talked to me about how much has changed since then, why this is the time to launch an AV startup, and where the industry is headed. Stay tuned for that story next week.

Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or my Signal at kkorosec.07, or email Sean O’Kane at sean.okane@techcrunch.com. 

Deals!

Lyft stuck to the North American market for much of its history, while Uber took a global, expand-at-all-costs strategy. Lyft has been trying to catch up since last year when it bought German multi-mobility app Freenow from BMW and Mercedes-Benz Mobility for about $197 million in cash. 

Now it’s acquiring ride-hailing app Gett’s U.K. business. Lyft says the deal will give it the majority of registered black cab drivers across Greater London on the Lyft platform. The company didn’t disclose the terms, but Calcalist reported it was $55 million. 

The company is also building out other means of transport in the region, including its recently renewed partnership with Serco to provide the bikes and stations for Europe’s bike-share system Santander Cycles. Lyft is also planning to start testing autonomous rides in London with Baidu later this year. 

Other deals that got my attention …

A&K Robotics, a Vancouver, Canada-based maker of autonomous vehicles for airports, raised an $8 million CAD Series A round led by BDC’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and Vantage Futures.

Decade Energy, which provides power infrastructure at logistics depots, raised €22 million in funding led by Eiffel Investment Group and SET Ventures, along with existing investors.

Reliable Robotics, a Silicon Valley startup developing autonomous systems for aircraft, raised $160 million in a round led by Nimble Partners, existing backers Eclipse, Lightspeed, Coatue, and Pathbreaker Ventures, and new investors Island Green Capital, Socium Ventures, AE Ventures (a strategic partner of the Boeing Company), RTX Ventures, Presidio Ventures (Sumitomo Corporation), UP.Partners, KAS Venture Partners, What If Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, and Mana Ventures. History lesson: Co-founder and CEO Robert Rose had a brief stint at Tesla where he was senior director of Autopilot and helped ship that first iteration in 2015.

PlusAI and blank-check company Churchill Capital Corp IX terminated its SPAC merger deal due to market conditions.

Porsche is selling its stake in the Bugatti Rimac joint venture, which it formed in 2021, as well as electric-vehicle maker Rimac Group. Porsche, which holds a 20.6% stake in Rimac and a 45% stake in the joint venture, is selling to HOF Capital. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Notable reads and other tidbits

Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy-duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. 

Ford and Chinese automaker Geely reportedly held talks about extending a European tie-up into the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported. The implications, of course, would be Chinese vehicles entering the U.S. market. But it sounds like talks have stalled, leaving this consequential deal in limbo. Bloomberg reported that Ford has denied these claims. 

Porsche is adding another EV to its lineup. The Cayenne electric coupe will come to market in late summer. There’s some interesting data in my article on why this one might be a winner for Porsche. 

The first customer-ready Rivian R2 SUVs rolled off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof. Founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said Rivian doesn’t anticipate any delays to the R2, which are expected to reach customers in June. 

One more thing …

As diligent readers of this newsletter know, I test-drive a fair number of vehicles, and sometimes they are not EVs. Take the Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, for instance. I was anxious to get into the roadster, not just because this $205,000 chiltern-green machine is sleek, powerful, and a convertible. I wanted to test the Apple CarPlay Ultra, the next-generation infotainment system that projects iPhone content to the vehicle’s screens (including the instrument cluster) and integrates vehicle controls like the radio, performance settings, and climate. CarPlay Ultra first launched in the Aston Martin, which isn’t exactly easy to get my hands on. 

My first experience with Apple Ultra CarPlay last summer was mixed. It was great — when it worked, but it often didn’t. The problem seemed to be tied to a bug that showed two versions of the vehicle in the Bluetooth settings. 

This time around, the setup was instant and it never glitched. Hooray. And it always worked. This really matters for Aston Martin, which for years was stuck with Mercedes-Benz’ old COMAND system. (Mercedes ditched that system in 2018 for its new MBUX one).