I’m a big fan of dictation and voice commands. The latter are the most common way for me to control my smart home, and I dictate a lot of my messages and other short pieces of text.
Apple’s built-in dictation features have certainly improved over the years, but trying out the third-party app Aqua Voice shows just how much better it could be if Apple really tried. Indeed, I actually wrote the entirety of this piece using Aqua Voice dictation …
Perhaps it’s the fact that I work from home, or just that I’m entirely unembarrassed to be seen in public dictating into my iPhone, but I have long used dictation as my primary interface with my phone. Pretty much all of my short messages (iMessage, WhatsApp, and so on) are dictated.
Early dictation and Siri comprehension were not great! Over the years, both have gotten much better, but still neither is anywhere close to where they could be today.
That was already clear from using other apps which support voice recognition, such as ChatGPT. But what has shown the greatest gap between what Apple currently delivers and what is possible today is trying out the third-party app Aqua Voice.
The app is a utility you install on your Mac. Once you have it, you can choose to remap the standard Fn keypress to activate Aqua Voice instead of built-in Mac dictation.
Seventeen errors versus one
To illustrate the difference between the two, I simultaneously activated Aqua Voice on one Mac and standard Mac dictation on the other, and then read out the opening to Steve Jobs’ famous commencement speech. (In my desktop setup, I use a SpeechWare mic – microphones specifically designed for the best dictation performance – but for my comparative test I used the built-in Mac mics.)
Since the use of commas could in part depend on my reading, and because Steve sometimes used punctuation in slightly unconventional ways, I’m ignoring minor differences in punctuation provided that they are still grammatically correct. I’m also ignoring any US vs UK spellings as both my Macs are set up to use both and that sometimes causes confusion.
Here is the Mac dictation version, with the 17 errors underlined:
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