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

(withaqua.com)
139 points the_king | 2 comments | 09 Apr 25 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 1.509s | 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 ◴[10 Apr 25 04:09 UTC] 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. SCdF ◴[10 Apr 25 06:32 UTC] No.43641249[source]▶
I use my (work) computer entirely with my voice, and it takes a lot of effort to work out what to actually write and to not ramble. Like you I've found that it's better to throw out words in sort of half sentence chunks, to give your brain time to work out what the next chunk is.

It's very hard, and I wouldn't do it if I didn't have to.

(which is why I'm always perplexed by these apps which allow voice dictation or voice control, but not as a complete accessibility package. I wouldn't be using my voice if my hands worked!)

It's also critically important (and after 3-4 years of this I still regularly fail at this) to actually read what you've written, and edit it before send, because those chunks don't always line up into something that I'd consider acceptably coherent. Even for a one sentence slack message.

(also, I have a kiwi accent, and the dictation software I use is not always perfect at getting what I wanted to say on the page)

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2. e12e ◴[10 Apr 25 10:46 UTC] No.43642620[source]▶
Curious about your current setup, and if maybe adding a macro/functionality to clean up input via an LLM would help?

In my experience LLM can be quite forgiving when given some unfinished input and asked to expand/clean up?