Finn, who is big-time dyslexic, has been using dictation software since the sixth grade when his dad set him up on Dragon Dictation. He used it through school to write papers, and has been keeping his own transcription benchmarks since college. All that time, writing with your voice has remained a cumbersome and brittle experience that is riddled with painpoints.
Dictation software is still terrible. All the solutions basically compete on accuracy (i.e. speech recognition), but none of them deal with the fundamentally brittle nature of the text that they generate. They don't try to format text correctly and require you to learn a bunch of specialized commands, which often are not worth it. They're not even close to a voice replacement for a keyboard.
Even post LLM, you are limited to a set of specific commands and the most accurate models don’t have any commands. Outside of these rules, the models have no sense for what is an instruction and what is content. You can’t say “and format this like an email” or “make the last bullet point shorter”. Aqua solves this.
This problem is important to Finn and millions of other people who would write with their voice if they could. Initially, we didn't think of it as a startup project. It was just something we wanted for ourselves. We thought maybe we'd write a novel with it - or something. After friends started asking to use the early versions of Aqua, it occurred to us that, if we didn't build it, maybe nobody would.
Aqua Voice is a text editor that you talk to like a person. Depending on the way that you say it and the context in which you're operating, Aqua decides whether to transcribe what you said verbatim, execute a command, or subtly modify what you said into what you meant to write.
For example, if you were to dictate: "Gryphons have classic forms resembling shield volcanoes," Aqua would output your text verbatim. But if you stumble over your words or start a sentence over a few times, Aqua is smart enough to figure that out and to only take the last version of the sentence.
The vision is not only to provide a more natural dictation experience, but to enable for the first time an AI-writing experience that feels natural and collaborative. This requires moving away from using LLMs for one-off chat requests and towards something that is more like streaming where you are in constant contact with the model. Voice is the natural medium for this.
Aqua is actually 6 models working together to transcribe, interpret, and rewrite the document according to your intent. Technically, executing a real-time voice application with a language model at its core requires complex coordination between multiple pieces. We use MoE transcription to outperform what was previously thought possible in terms of real-time accuracy. Then we sync up with a language model to determine what should be on the screen as quickly as possible.
The model isn't perfect, but it is ready for early adopters and we’ve already been getting feedback from grateful users. For example, a historian with carpal tunnel sent us an email he wrote using Aqua and said that he is now able to be five times as productive as he was previously. We've heard from other people with disabilities that prevent them from typing. We've also seen good adoption from people who are dyslexic or simply prefer talking to typing. It’s being used for everything from emails to brainstorming to papers to legal briefings.
While there is much left to do in terms of latency and robustness, the best experiences with Aqua are beginning to feel magical. We would love for you to try it out and give us feedback, which you can do with no account on https://withaqua.com. If you find it useful, it’s $10/month after a 1000-token free trial. (We want to bump the free trial in the future, but we're a small team, and running this thing isn’t cheap.)
We’d love to hear your ideas and comments with voice-to-text!