Hy4 preview vs Willow on IOS: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Hy4 preview and Willow on IOS — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Hy4 preview
Tencent
Tencent's open-weight Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 49B active parameters and a 1M-token context window.
Key features
- 770B Mixture-of-Experts Architecture: Holds 770 billion total parameters while activating only 49 billion per token, so capacity scales without proportional inference cost.
- 1M-Token Context Window: Accepts inputs exceeding one million tokens, allowing whole codebases, long document sets or extended agent traces in a single prompt.
- Apache 2.0 Open Weights: Released under a permissive licence that allows commercial use, modification and redistribution with no separate agreement.
- Productivity Task Focus: Tuned for real-world coding, office work and scientific research rather than narrow benchmark optimisation.
- Multi-Product Availability: Accessible globally through Tencent's WorkBuddy, CodeBuddy, Yuanbao and ima applications in addition to the raw weights.
- API Access via TokenHub and OpenRouter: Can be called through Tencent Cloud TokenHub or OpenRouter for teams that prefer hosted inference over self-hosting.
Best for
- Whole-Repository Code Work: Load an entire codebase into the million-token context to reason about refactors and cross-file dependencies at once.
- Long-Horizon Agent Tasks: Drive multi-step agent workflows where the full history of tool calls and intermediate results must stay in context.
- Self-Hosted Deployment: Run a frontier-scale open-weight model on private infrastructure where data cannot leave the organisation.
- Scientific Literature Analysis: Ingest large collections of papers or experimental logs and synthesise findings without chunking the input.
- Office Document Processing: Summarise, draft and restructure long reports, contracts and spreadsheets in enterprise workflows.
- Commercial Fine-Tuning: Adapt the weights for a proprietary product under the Apache 2.0 licence without negotiating a model licence.
Willow on IOS
Willow Voice
Fast, context-aware speech-to-text dictation for Mac and iPhone with custom dictionaries and privacy-focused handling.
Key features
- Real-time Dictation: Converts spoken input into text on macOS and iPhone with immediate transcription for emails, documents, notes, and messages to speed up writing workflows.
- Context-Aware Processing: Uses contextual language understanding to improve accuracy and punctuation, adapting transcription to sentence structure and conversational context.
- Custom Dictionaries: Allows users to add domain-specific vocabulary, names, and technical terms so transcriptions reflect industry- or user-specific language correctly.
- Automatic Editing & Formatting: Applies automatic edits, punctuation, and formatting rules to raw transcribed text to reduce manual cleanup after dictation.
- App Integrations: Designed to work across common workflows and apps (email, documents, note-taking, messaging, and the Cursor editor) to insert transcribed text where users work.
- Privacy-Focused Handling: Emphasizes secure and private handling of voice data and transcription results to protect user information and sensitive content.
- Real-time speech-to-text dictation on iPhone and Mac
- Context-aware automatic edits to improve transcript quality
- Custom dictionaries and terminology support
- Privacy-focused operation with options for local/self-hosted inference
- Integration-ready: supports use in email, documents, note-taking, messaging, and developer workflows
- Willow Inference Server for self-hosted STT, TTS, LLM, and WebRTC inference
Best for
- Writing emails hands-free: Dictate long or short emails on Mac or iPhone to compose messages faster without switching to a keyboard.
- Meeting and lecture notes: Capture spoken content during meetings or lectures and get edited, punctuated notes ready for review and sharing.
- Document drafting and editing: Rapidly create drafts of reports, articles, or documents via voice, with automatic formatting reducing post-edit effort.
- Messaging and quick replies: Compose rapid, accurate message responses in chat and SMS apps using voice input on iPhone.
- Technical and domain-specific transcription: Use custom dictionaries to accurately transcribe industry jargon, code-related terms, names, and acronyms for developer or specialist workflows (e.g., Cursor integration).
- Accessibility and hands-free computing: Provide an accessible input method for users with mobility or dexterity impairments who need reliable speech-to-text on macOS and iOS.
- Hands-free email and document composition on iPhone and Mac
- Faster note-taking and meeting transcription
- Voice-driven messaging and chat input
- Accessibility for users needing speech input
- Enterprise/local deployment using Willow Inference Server for private on-premise transcription and TTS
- Developer integration for embedding STT/TTS/LLM capabilities into apps or real-time WebRTC flows