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Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

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Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#81

Post by the_king »

emacsen wrote: post #55
the_king wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can do that, with some help from the community.

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/…

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.

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#82

Post by joshjob42 »

pablopeniche wrote: post #80
razemio wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

>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 repl…

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.

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#83

Post by pablopeniche »

joshjob42 wrote: post #82
pablopeniche wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 repl…

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 liter…

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.

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#84

Post by pablopeniche »

toddmorey wrote: post #37
fxtentacle wrote: post #10

This looks like it'll slurp up all your data and upload it into a cloud. Thanks, no. I want privacy, offline mode and source code for something as crucial to system security as an input method. "we also collect and process your voice inputs [..] We leverage this data for improvements and development [..] Sharing of your information [..] service providers [..] OpenAI" https://withaqua.com/privacy

And man it's another monthly subscription. I'm not mad at them for finding a gap in the market and putting a business around it. I'm mad at Apple for leaving that gap... hopefully built in voice dictation improves quickly.

"hopefully built in voice dictation improves quickly." I would not hold my breath on that one lol

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#85

Post by pablopeniche »

alxlu wrote: post #39

I’ve been using this for a while now and I really enjoy it. I ran into a semi-obscure bug and emailed them and they basically fixed it the same day. I do wish there was a mobile app though (or maybe an iOS keyboard). It would also be nice to be able to have a separate hotkey you can set up to send the output to a specific app (instead of just the active one).

<3

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#86

Post by [deleted] »

joshjob42 wrote: post #82
pablopeniche wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 repl…

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 liter…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#88

Post by oulipo »

pablopeniche wrote: post #7
oulipo wrote: post #2

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?

Just tried it and it crashed

Then submit a report, but for 100s of people using the open-source, free and extensible version, it works great!

For me with a small (but very accurate) whisper model it can be even faster than AquaVoice, and works locally (which is really important)

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#89

Post by oulipo »

canada_dry wrote: post #36
fxtentacle wrote: post #10

This looks like it'll slurp up all your data and upload it into a cloud. Thanks, no. I want privacy, offline mode and source code for something as crucial to system security as an input method. "we also collect and process your voice inputs [..] We leverage this data for improvements and development [..] Sharing of your information [..] service providers [..] OpenAI" https://withaqua.com/privacy

First thing I looked for and read: the FAQ. No mention of privacy (or on prem) - so assumed it's 100% cloud. Non-starter for me. Accuracy is important, but privacy is more so. Hopefully a service with these capabilities will be available where the first step has the user complete a brief training session, sends that to the cloud to tailor the recognition parameters for their voice and mannerisms... then loads that lo…

A similar but offline tool is VoiceInk, it's also open-source so you can extend it

Re: Show HN: Aqua Voice 2 – Fast Voice Input for Mac and Windows

#90

Post by razemio »

pablopeniche wrote: post #80
razemio wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

>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 repl…

I am not Parkash. Just check my profile. I am not a bot. github.com / razem-io. I checked his youtube videos. He seems to lack presentation skills but his app is very usable at its current state.

I have both apps open. The STT seems to be faster with VoiceInk. Like it is instant. I can send you a video if you want.

I am sorry. I did not want your product to look bad. You are right you still need to offload the llm part to openrouter and the like if you want this to be fast too. However, having the ability to switch AI on/off on demand and context aware with custom prompts is perfect. It can use ollama too. Yes this will be much slower but local. Best off both worlds. No subscription, even if you use cloud ai.

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