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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: 0.2s | 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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the_king ◴[10 Apr 25 04:29 UTC] No.43640621[source]▶
I think Aqua v1 had two problems:

1. The models weren't ready.

2. The interactions were often strained. Not every edit/change is easy to articulate with your voice.

If 1 had been our only problem, we might have had a hit. In reality, I think optimizing model errors allowed us to ignore some fundamental awkwardness in the experience. We've tried to rectify this with v2 by putting less emphasis on streaming for every interaction and less emphasis on commands, replacing it with context.

Hopefully it can become a tool in the toolbox.

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1. adamesque ◴[10 Apr 25 12:55 UTC] No.43643305[source]▶
Looking forward to giving it another try!