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Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

(withaqua.com)
139 points the_king | 1 comments | 09 Apr 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.355s | source

Hey HN - It’s Finn and Jack from Aqua Voice (https://withaqua.com). Aqua is fast AI dictation for your desktop and our attempt to make voice a first-class input method.

Video: https://withaqua.com/watch

Try it here: https://withaqua.com/sandbox

Finn is uber dyslexic and has been using dictation software since sixth grade. For over a decade, he’s been chasing a dream that never quite worked — using your voice instead of a keyboard.

Our last post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39828686) about this seemed to resonate with the community - though it turned out that version of Aqua was a better demo than product. But it gave us (and others) a lot of good ideas about what should come next.

Since then, we’ve remade Aqua from scratch for speed and usability. It now lives on your desktop, and it lets you talk into any text field -- Cursor, Gmail, Slack, even your terminal.

It starts up in under 50ms, inserts text in about a second (sometimes as fast as 450ms), and has state-of-the-art accuracy. It does a lot more, but that’s the core. We’d love your feedback — and if you’ve got ideas for what voice should do next, let’s hear them!

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SCdF ◴[09 Apr 25 21:03 UTC] No.43637965[source]▶
I currently use Talon, which I note is not in your benchmarks.

I can't find any documentation on how Aqua works, or how it compares, so I'm not sure it's meant to be a replacement / competitor to Talon? What are you configuring? How are you telling it that you like "genz" style in Slack? Can I create custom configurations / macros?

One thing I like about Talon is it's not magic. Which maybe is not what you're going for. But I am giving it explicit commands that I know it will understand (if it understands my accent obvs), as opposed to guessing and constructing a human language vague sentence and hope that an llm will work it out. Which means it feels like something I can actually become fast with, and build up muscle memory of.

Also that it's completely offline, so I can actually run it on a work computer without my security folks freaking out.

replies(2): >>43638007 #>>43638122 #
1. the_king ◴[09 Apr 25 21:19 UTC] No.43638122[source]▶
We're building something different, but there is some overlap. Aqua is built for max speed, while keeping accuracy high. To achieve that, inference runs in a datacenter (for now).

You can customize Aqua using custom instructions, similar to ChatGPT custom instructions, and get some Talon functionality from it:

In my own, I have:

1. Breaking the paragraphs with three or four sentences.

2. Don't start a sentence with "and".

3. Use lowercase in Slack and iMessage.

4. Here are some common terminal commands...