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Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

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61–70 of 255 posts

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#61

From one dyslexic to another, who never got the option to even use a computer in school or college and instead was forced to write out everything long-hand, thank you so much for this. I use voice-to-text in the workshop and when taking notes and reviewing a PR. And all the current options are pretty much what you would expect. More focused on accuracy, which is usually quite poor, which, to paraphrase, "It's Erin wi…

I think I developed "bad handwriting" partially to hide misspellings—this is necessary in school though.

On pure WER we are state-of-the-art in our testing, but more importantly, mistakes in Aqua are correctable.

So you can speak your mind instead of having to wait until you have the perfect sentence and then dictate it.

That said, we know it's not perfect, but we know a few more months of work will have it really solid.

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#62
Awesome demo. A challenge where I work is an extreme acronym rich lingo. Is your model open to extension or learning in some fashion to accommodate picking up thousands of acronyms? We also can shift into rapid, specialized speaking patterns that I think are quite learnable but that are not really 'out of the box' for normal software products. I would think many industries could feature their own lingos like this.

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#63

I use Apple dictation heavily for transcribing interviews. I've tried all the voice-to-text services out there and none have been reliable enough *at transcribing an audio file. I've settled on playing audio in my headphones and pausing while I carefully dictate text into a document. If I could upload the audio file, get a first-pass transcription, and then go through and edit / make corrections with voice, that woul…

Have you tried openai whisper? Last time I compared it was quite a bit better than all the other options.

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Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#65

I developed an RSI-related injury back in 94/95 and have been using speech recognition ever since. I would love a solution that would let me move off of Windows. I would love a solution allowing me to easily dictate text areas in Firefox, Thunderbird, or VS code. Most important, however, would be the ability to edit/manipulate the text using what Nuance used to call Select-and-Say. The ability to do minor edits, repl…

Thank you! We love hearing stories like this.

We want to get Aqua into as many places as possible — and will go full tilt into that as soon as the core is extremely extremely solid (this is our focus right now).

Great lessons from Dragon Dictation. Would love to learn more about the speech recognition user group meetings! Are those still running? Are you a part of any?

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#67

I have goosebumps! Jiminy Crickets... I have SOOO many use cases for your thing. [edit: what does this mean: https://i.imgur.com/rHQt6ul.png when attempting to demo?] --- * I want an agent that I can speak to on Mobile headset as I love to think out loud - and air my thoughts and thought process through talking through my internal dialogue - if this could just capture what I am saying and log it and I can refine thou…

Thank you, awesome to see how many ideas this inspired! We've thought about a lot of similar things ourselves and will certainly build some of them :)

Sorry about the error you are getting! It's a Firefox thing. We will patch. In the meantime, Chrome/Safari will work

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#68
post #17

I have neuropathy in my arms, so this is something I'm very interested in! Do I have to use a specific Aqua Voice text editor, or can I use it in apps like JetBrains Rider and Visual Studio Code? If so, are there some kind of plugins that would allow using IDE-specific features? (e.g. "build and run the API project")

Hey! Right now our focus is getting the core tech solid and we can do that much faster if we aren't juggling multiple platforms and plugins (we learned this the hard way), but after that we are going to blitz into as many places as possible.

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#69
post #21

The demo seemed to struggle a bit with my accent (Scottish), getting quite a few words wrong - for example, every time I said "test" it would write "taste". Is this something you can improve going forward?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NMS2VnDveP8

In the past when I've been in the USA, I've legit had to put on an American accent when calling for taxis and the like!

I don't even have that strong an accent, and I always try my best to enunciate correctly when talking to others shrug

Re: Launch HN: Aqua Voice (YC W24) – Voice-driven text editor

#70

You’re early and this is effectively a demo but just in case this is a blind spot: “token” is an in-the-weeds LLMism that means nothing in the context of transcription. Your costs may be measured in tokens but that’s not relevant to customers. Just “A free trial” with no quantifier would be better than 1k tokens.

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