Alexander Williams

I am a very long-time user of Dragon Dictate as well as other voice-to-text options, and I have to tell you that Aqua is the best voice-to-text solution I've ever had the pleasure of using. As someone with a disability, it's imperative that I have something that works well predictably and at a reasonable cost because it's something that I'm going to be spending a lot of time with.

Aqua ticks all the boxes.

On top of that, the vocabulary that I use can sometimes be very specialized, but Aqua allows words to be added to its dictionary and does an excellent job of rendering them in place.

I have not hesitated to recommend Aqua to anybody that I know.

Being an online tool, it requires network access on the back end to really do its job in its model.

It would be nice if more of that power could be allocated locally for situations in which network access is inconvenient or impossible.

Dragon Dictate, while an entirely local application, is extremely explicit in order to get it to work well. You really must dictate your punctuation in order for it to do a good job. While that is only a light impediment, it is an impediment.

In addition, it is only occasionally updated, and when it is, you are paying hundreds of dollars for a new version of the application.

In terms of development cycle, it's stable, but not particularly improving. Aqua Voice, on the other hand, is very much in a state of continual improvement, and the creators are extremely responsive.

While the buy-in for Aqua is on a monthly basis, the development that you get for it and the access that it provides is easily worth the $10 a month.

It handles voice dictation in pretty much every application I've tried in Windows 10, from browsers to terminals to editors.

Yes, you can. And it's very good at making those changes after the fact if you realize that you have entered something incorrectly in streaming mode.

You do have the option in settings to "avoid clipboard history" in the settings, but this is an online tool which uses network resources to do the interpretation, so take that into account. Privacy mode can also be set in order to indicate that you don't want transcription data to be stored or used to improve the product. But again, it's worth keeping in mind the processing does not occur locally on your machine.