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Posted by u/the_king 9 months ago
Aqua Voice (YC W24) for Desktop
Hey, this is Finn from Aqua Voice. Today we're releasing Aqua Voice for Desktop (https://withaqua.com). Aqua is a voice-driven text editor that lets you dictate using natural language commands.

The desktop experience is the best way to use Aqua yet. It lets you talk easily into any app and comes with:

- Custom dictionary: can have up to 800 words/phrases at a time, no pronunciation tuning required.

- Context Awareness: automatically identifies relevant words and phrases in the active application. This uses system accessibility APIs (not screenshots, like some others) and is heavily processed on device before inference to preserve privacy.

- Command recognition: the system now shows you what it's going to do before it does it. "Deleting…" or "Adding to list…" or "Fixing Spelling…"

We've also spent a ton of time getting better out-of-the-box accuracy. Our core transcription engine is the most accurate real-time system that we know of. We scored 3.2% WER on Librispeech clean, significantly better than the next best real-time system we tested (Google) at 5.5%. We also released a benchmark that tests accuracy & human-friendly formatting which showed that out of the box, Wispr Flow makes 10x as many mistakes as Aqua Voice for emails and technical writing. The full write-up including audio and code is available here (https://withaqua.com/blog/benchmark-nov-2024)

Everyone uses dictation for different reasons - I started in sixth grade (dyslexic) with Dragon Professional and always wanted it to be more than a clunky substitute for the keyboard. Hopefully Aqua Desktop can be that for some of you.

Would love to hear your comments!

-Finn

digityny · 9 months ago
Hello, I am a paying customer experiencing issues using the record function on the website from my workplace, although it works perfectly fine from home. It seems there is no option to report an issue through a form or contact anyone directly, thus my report here.. I am using Chrome. When I click the blue button to record the microphone icon appears next to the URL, but the blue line with the control period keeps spinning. Please help. my email is alexrocksthis@gmail.com
basiskarten · 9 months ago
Hey Finn, great project and impressive demo. I had some questions that I was able to answer via the FAQ, except for #3. I'll put the first two here just in case somebody else has the same questions:

1) What about languages other than English? Just English is supported for now.

2) Is this running locally? No.

3) Could you imagine offering a one time payment option? Dragon is currently charging 999 € for their latest version but I really like the fact that I actually own the software after paying once.

In any case, good luck with this!

blueberrychpstx · 9 months ago
Haven’t clicked so fast on anything in a while. Excited to use this on desktop
davispalmie · 9 months ago
Command execution and formatting in the evals is nice instead of just tunneling on transcription accuracy. Are the new benchmarks open sourced?
the_king · 9 months ago

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newgalfix · 9 months ago
Pretty impressive accuracy!
rcefalu10 · 9 months ago
How fast is it? Does it process what I am saying in realtime?
the_king · 9 months ago
Yes! It's fully real time. This was a challenge, but something we decided not to compromise on.

Imagine a pen that was only showing you words at the end of a paragraph — that'd be crazy! But this is how most people use voice today because real time is so hard. Latency is 800ms-2000ms from speech.

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pablopeniche · 9 months ago
Exciting!