Aqua Voice broke into the YC party without tickets

We've typed for 150 years. It's time to speak. Aqua Voice is AI dictation for Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Hold one key and talk. Clean, formatted text lands in whatever app you're using: Slack, Gmail, Cursor, Notion, even your terminal. No per-app setup. No browser extension. Aqua runs on Avalon, our own speech recognition model, trained on how people actually talk to computers: prompts, code, and email. At its debut on the independent Open ASR Leaderboard in October 2025, Avalon ranked first among proprietary models and sixth overall. When 9to5Mac ran the same passage through Apple Dictation and Aqua, Apple made 17 errors. Aqua made 1. Their verdict: "the best dictation app I've ever used." Fast enough to feel instant: Aqua starts in under 50 milliseconds, keeps up with speech at up to 230 words per minute, and lands your text about 450 milliseconds after you stop talking. In 49 languages. Dictation is only the start. Select any text, hold the key, and say the change: Edit Mode rewrites it in place. Realtime Mode shows your words as you speak, and saying "send it" submits the message hands-free. Deep Context, off by default, reads your screen so names, code, and technical terms come out right. Developers get the same engine through the Avalon API, compatible with the OpenAI SDK. Used by people at Amazon, Notion, and Perplexity. SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified. Business adds SSO/SAML, SCIM, and Zero Data Retention. Aqua Voice was founded in 2023 and backed by Y Combinator (W24). It was built by a dyslexic founder who has used speech-to-text since middle school and spent years on the dictation software he wished existed: fast, accurate, and invisible. Download for Mac and Windows, and iPhone at aquavoice.com