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139 points the_king | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | 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!

1. rickydroll ◴[] No.43643663[source]
I've been using Aqua since it was announced on HNN. I've survived the teething pains by using a mixture of Aqua and Dragon, depending on what I was doing. With this new Windows app, I've given up using Dragon for anything.

Things I've learned are:

1. It works better if you're connected by Ethernet than by Wi-Fi.

2. It needs to have a longer recognition history because sometimes you hit the wrong key to end a recognition session, and it loses everything.

3. Besides the longer history, a debugging mode that records all the characters sent to the dictation box would be useful. Sometimes, I see one set of words, blink, and then it's replaced with a new recognition result. Capturing would be useful in describing what went wrong.

4. There should be a way to tell us when a new version is running. Occasionally, I've run into problems where I'm getting errors, and I can't tell if it's my speaking, my audio chain, my computer, the network, or the app.

5. Grammarly is a great add-on because it helps me correct mis-speakings and odd little errors, like too many spaces caused by starting and stopping recognition.

When Dragon Systems went through bankruptcy court, a public benefits corporation bid for the core technology because it recognized that Dragon was a critical tool for people with disabilities to function in a digital world.

In my opinion, Aqua has reached a similar status as an essential tool. Well, it doesn't fully replace Dragon for those who need command and control (yet). The recognition accuracy and smoothness are so amazing that I can't envision returning to Dragon Systems without much pain. The only thing worse would be going back to a keyboard.

Aqua Guys, don't fuck it up.