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139 points the_king | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.514s | 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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aminsadeghi ◴[] No.43638350[source]
Is there going to be Linux support at some point?
replies(1): >>43640199 #
the_king ◴[] No.43640199[source]
We can do that, with some help from the community.
replies(2): >>43640283 #>>43641515 #
1. emacsen ◴[] No.43641515[source]
I'm a paying customer and I signed onto Aqua Voice shortly after your demo on HN.

My experience with it has been overall positive but mixed. I enjoy using it for dictation, but I found that issuing editing commands and having them recognized/executed often took a lot longer than making an edit myself (which I can't do while in dictation mode).

But as a paying customer, seeing you go in this direction is somewhat sad/frustrating. You're abandoning the product I use, and you're saying that if I want to see my platform supported, I or someone from the community has to provide it- for a fully proprietary paid application.

I understand that I'm a minority user, but it's a bit disappointing to read this.

replies(1): >>43649562 #
2. the_king ◴[] No.43649562[source]
Totally understand, thanks for being a customer. I'm sorry we weren't able to make the web version as smooth as we wanted to.

We do plan to support Linux. This was probably a little bit of a blind spot for us - not realizing that anyone running a Linux desktop doesn't even have system voice tool to fall back on.