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139 points the_king | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.403s | 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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adamesque ◴[] No.43640539[source]
I was very delighted by Aqua v1, which felt like magic at first.

But I’ve noticed/learned that I can’t dictate written content. My brain just does not work that way at all — as I write I am constantly pausing to think, to revise, etc and it feels like a completely different part of my brain is engaged. Everything I dictated with Aqua I had to throw away and rewrite.

Has anyone had similar problems, and if so, had any success retraining themselves toward dictation? There are fleeting moments where it truly feels like it would be much faster.

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1. noahjk ◴[] No.43640654[source]
Same here. My two biggest hurdles are:

1. like you mentioned, the second I start talking about something, I totally forget where I'm going, have to pause, it's like my thoughts aren't coming to me. Probably some sort of mental feedback loop plus, like you mentioned, different method of thinking.

2. in the back of my mind, I'm always self-conscious that someone is listening, so it's a privacy / being judged / being overheard feeling which adds a layer of mental feedback.

There's also not great audio clues for handling on-the-fly editing. I've tried to say "parentheses word parentheses" and it just gets written out. I've tried to say "strike that" and it gets written out. These interfaces are very 'happy path' and don't do a lot of processing (on iOS, I can say "period" and get a '.' (or ?,!) but that's about the extent).

I have had some success with long-form recording sessions which are transcribed afterwards. After getting over the short initial hump, I can brain-dump to the recording, and then trust an app like Voice Notes or Superwhisper to transcribe, and then clean up after.

The main issue I run into there, though, is that I either forget to record something (ex. a conversation that I want to review later) or there is too much friction / I don't record often enough to launch it quickly or even remember to use that workflow.

I get the same feeling with smart home stuff - it was awesome for a while to turn lights on and off with voice, but lately there's the added overhead of "did it hear me? do I need to repeat myself? What's the least amount of words I can say? Why can't I just think something into existence instead? Or have a perfect contextual interface on a physical device?"