Aqua Voice Editing Features
Aqua Voice has a new editing mode that lets you select text and reshape it by voice, and it handles instructions well enough that "turn this into a Shakespearean sonnet" actually works. Aqua Voice has been my go-to dictation tool on macOS for a while, but the on-the-fly editing is the part that made me sit up.
The setup I use
Right option key is bound to dictation: push to talk, or double tap for the longer modes. Nothing new there.
The context awareness is still the quiet workhorse. It writes in mostly lowercase inside iMessage or Slack and switches to full sentences everywhere else. Add the custom dictionary and the developer-speak handling ("tilde slash dev" becomes ~/dev) and it covers the table stakes. I've written about that part before.
The editing mode
Select text, say what you want, and it rewrites in place.
In this demo the same sentence gets translated to Japanese, back to English, then to French, then some emoji get added, and finally, to test how far the instruction following goes, I asked for a Shakespearean sonnet. It obliged.
The catch
All of this is networked and hosted, so it runs against Aqua's servers rather than locally. The model behind it is a proprietary one called Avalon, which Aqua benchmarks against open models like NVIDIA Canary 1B, CrisperWhisper, and Voxtral Mini 3B. Their headline claim is 97.4% accuracy on coding and AI terms versus 65.1% for Whisper Large v3, plus 3.2% WER on LibriSpeech-clean.
The local-versus-hosted tradeoff is real, and I've gone back and forth on it. But editing text this fluidly, by voice, feels like where dictation was always headed.
