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139 points the_king | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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oulipo ◴[] No.43637047[source]
Interesting!

A nice open-source alternative is VoiceInk, check it out: https://github.com/Beingpax/VoiceInk

do you also plan to open-source part of your platform?

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razemio ◴[] No.43642627[source]
I just tried it on a M4 Max MacBook Pro. When you have such a processor, it seems to be even faster than Aqua Voice 2, does more, optional supports open router AND is open source? Thank you so much for the recommendation!
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pablopeniche ◴[] No.43649521[source]
>it seems to be even faster >runs locally

This is obviously a lie. If this was true, all the inference provider companies would go to zero. I support open-source as much as the next guy here, but it's obvious that the local version will be slower or break more often. Like, come on guys. Be real.

To illustrate this, M4 Max chips do 38 TOPS in FP8. An NVIDIA H100 does 4,000 TOPS.

Prakash if you're going to bot our replies, at least make it believable.

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1. joshjob42 ◴[] No.43649620[source]
I mean, it's just doing STT, it's not trying to run inference on a frontier model, and if you have to connect to a remote datacenter vs your own machine that could add latency that slows down the experience. There are also tradeoffs in deployment in terms of latency vs throughput that doesn't occur on your local machine that only ever is doing STT on one thing at a time.

I'm skeptical of the claim that local is literally faster, but it's not impossible in the way you suggest.

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2. pablopeniche ◴[] No.43650192[source]
If you watch the video you'll see that Aqua does more than just STT and why we need the frontier models. I think if you want just STT of what you said verbatim, then yea any local version of Whisper is great. If you want the enhancements shown in the video, you need the frontier models. And doing that locally is slow.
3. ◴[] No.43650956[source]