In-Depth Reviews
What's great
I do a lot of writing and text-based communication every day for work. Before Aqua, that meant that I was constantly hammering away on my keyboard all day. After beginning to use Aqua, though, I can literally sit back in my chair and just dictate everything I need to. It also means that I can typically get longer thoughts out faster and easier by just talking. Even if that includes technical terms or code blocks. With the streaming mode, it also makes it really easy to go back and edit or even format the text before I even paste it in. It's become the de facto way that I write on my computer.
What needs improvement
While not a major issue, I have had times where I will have a long text block that does not get pasted correctly after I finish. I've been able to get over this by just going into the clipboard history and copying and pasting myself, but it's a bit of an annoyance when one of the main reasons I use Aqua is for the speed.
vs Alternatives
I tried a couple of other voice-to-text options, and I ultimately picked and have stuck with Aqua because it's the fastest and has the best accuracy of any of the ones that I've tried. Its overall design and UX also just makes sense to me. It just immediately became a part of my workflow.
How accurate is dictation with technical or domain-specific terms?
This works really well. I've even verbally communicated blocks of text or file names, and it formats them correctly. I also have a few instructions set up so that it knows in what apps I'm most likely going to be referring to code and file names versus ones where I'm likely just talking normally.
Does it reliably insert text into Gmail, Slack, and IDEs?
In a few rare cases, I've had it not paste correctly, but that's just been a random error every now and then. In general, it works perfectly well across all apps and websites that I've used.
Can I create custom voice commands or macros?
I could be missing this feature, but not that I'm aware of. You do have the ability to set up a dictionary as well as instructions. So if there's a particular word that would maybe on a normal basis be mistyped, you can add it to your dictionary. And then if there's a particular style or format or something like that that you want it to follow in a particular app, you can set instructions to have it follow that.
So for example, if you always write in lowercase on Slack, you can write that out in an instruction so that it will automatically write all in lowercase when you're using Slack.
& Breathe
