iOS Engineer

Aqua Voice Brings Its AI Dictation App to Android TMCnet News [October 06, 2026] | / | Aqua Voice Brings Its AI Dictation App to Android Aqua Voice, the AI dictation company behind the Avalon 1.5 speech recognition model, today released Aqua Voice for Android on Google Play. The app places a small floating Aqua button above the keyboard in any Android app. Users tap it, talk, and finished text lands where they are typing: a WhatsApp reply, an email, a note, a Slack message, or a prompt for an AI assistant. Aqua Voice for Android works alongside the keyboard people already use rather than replacing it. There is no keyboard to switch, no per-app setup, and nothing to paste. The app inserts text directly into the active field. A voice editing feature lets users select text, tap Edit, and say a change such as "make this a list" or "make it shorter," and Aqua rewrites the selection in place. Android has been the most requested addition from Aqua's users since the company shipped its iPhone keyboard in April 2026. With this release, one Aqua account covers all four major platforms. Custom dictionaries, replacements, and writing-style instructions sync between devices, and a single Pro or Max subscription applies everywhere. "People have been asking us for Android since the day we shipped the iPhone keyboard," said Finnian Brown, co-founder and CEO of Aqua Voice. "It is the same model, the same account, and the same one-button habit. You tap, you talk, and the words are there." Aqua's apps run on Avalon 1.5, the company's own speech recognition model, trained on how people talk to computers: prompts, code, and email. The orginal Avalon debuted first among proprietary models and sixth overall on the independent Open ASR Leaderboard in October 2025, and Avalon 1.5, released in April 2026, reached a 5.55 percent word error rate on that benchmark. In a 9to5Mac side-by-side test of the same passage, Apple's built-in dictation made 17 errors and Aqua made one. Dictation is available in 49 languages, and the Android app's interface is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, and Russian. Aqua Voice for Android is available today on Google Play for phones and tablets running Android 10 or later. The first 1,000 words are free. Pro and Max subscriptions are available through Google Play, and existing subscribers sign in with their Aqua account at no additional cost. Download it at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aquavoice.android or learn more at https://aquavoice.com/android. About Aqua Voice Aqua Voice builds AI dictation for Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. Hold one key or tap one button, talk into any app, and clean, formatted text appears. Its apps run on Avalon 1.5, the company's own speech recognition model. The original Avalon debuted first among proprietary models on the independent Open ASR Leaderboard. Aqua Voice is SOC 2 Type II and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified, offers a Privacy Mode that does not store transcripts, and provides the Avalon 1.5 API for developers. Founded in 2023 by Finnian Brown and Jack McIntire and backed by Y Combinator (W24). Learn more at https://aquavoice.com. Android and Google Play are trademarks of Google LLC View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261006971603/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage] |

It feels like AI companies want us all to talk to their products out loud more often. Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, to name a few, have added functionality to let users talk with their AI bots as naturally as they would with another person, taking advantage of advances in speech-to-text technology.A startup called Wispr Flow feels it can outdo the bigwigs, though, with its dictation tech that supports more than 100 languages. The company today augmented its existing Windows and Mac apps with a new iOS app that doubles as a keyboard, letting you use your voice to type inside any app.Now, you might be thinking this is just another speech-to-text company, but this reporter came away particularly impressed with Wispr Flow. As an Indian, I’ve never found a speech-to-text app that can fully understand what I am saying. I have also had a hard time getting AI assistants like Alexa and Siri to execute requests.However, Wispr Flow presented a vastly better experience compared to any dictation tech I’ve used from Big Tech. At first, I had to edit my sentences across the Wispr Flow desktop and mobile apps, but after using it a few times, the dictation experience improved drastically