Aqua Voice: Price, Privacy and How It Works

Aqua Voice is an AI dictation app that sends your speech to its own cloud speech model, Avalon, and types finished, punctuated text into whatever app you are using on a Mac, a Windows PC, an iPhone or an Android phone. The free plan gives you 1,000 words ¹, a one-time test drive ², and Pro costs $10 a month billed annually ³ or $12 billed monthly ⁴. Its strength is accuracy on names, code and technical terms, which the maker supports with published benchmark results and which one independent reviewer confirmed. Its tradeoffs: there is no offline mode on the desktop ⁵, transcripts may be kept on its servers unless you turn on Privacy Mode ⁶, and the free allowance is a trial rather than a monthly quota.

This guide is part of our overview of dictation software. Every price and policy below comes from a published page, and every number is cited to the fact behind it. Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows that competes with Aqua Voice, so we have kept to checked facts and quoted the maker's own words wherever a policy matters.

Aqua Voice is cloud AI dictation with its own speech model

Aqua Voice is cloud dictation: your audio goes to Aqua's servers, where its Avalon model runs ⁵. You hold an activation key, talk, and release, a push-to-talk pattern, and Aqua types the result into your other apps ⁷, including any Windows app ⁸. It also refines dictated text in real time, and its home page says the result is "perfected by AI" ⁹. Our guide to AI cleanup for dictation explains what that step changes and when it can go wrong.

Avalon is Aqua's own model, built for talking to computers

Some apps of this kind started from general-purpose speech recognition models: Wispr Flow, for example, was reported in June 2025 to build on Meta's Llama and OpenAI's Whisper ¹⁰. Aqua trained its own. It introduced Avalon on August 22, 2025 ¹¹ and switched its desktop apps to Avalon 1.5 on April 13, 2026 ¹².

To measure that, Aqua built its own benchmark, AISpeak, from clips in which speakers use AI and coding terms, and scored whether each model got the key term right. On AISpeak-10, a challenging subset of the benchmark, Avalon got the term right 97.4 percent of the time ¹¹, against 65.1 percent for OpenAI's Whisper Large v3 ¹³, 51.5 percent for NVIDIA Canary 1B ¹⁴ and 78.8 percent for ElevenLabs Scribe ¹⁵.

Read that chart with care. AISpeak is a test Aqua designed, on the kind of speech Aqua optimized for, and it scores one key term per clip rather than the whole transcript. On a public benchmark that Aqua did not design, Avalon also did well. Aqua reported in October 2025 that Avalon averaged a 6.24 percent word error rate on the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard, first among proprietary models and sixth among all models listed at the time ¹⁶. That is a strong result, but it is a snapshot reported by the vendor, and leaderboard places move as new models arrive. Our guide to word error rate explains what the number does and does not tell you. Developers can also call Avalon directly through an API priced at $0.39 per hour of audio, billed per second ¹⁷.

One independent test found far fewer errors than Mac dictation

The best outside evidence is a hands-on test by 9to5Mac in August 2025 ¹⁸. The reviewer dictated the same passage into Apple's built-in Mac dictation and into Aqua Voice, and counted 17 errors for Apple's dictation against a single error for Aqua ¹⁸. It is one passage read by one reviewer, so it is a single example, but it points the same way as the benchmarks.

The company is small, young and backed by Y Combinator

Aqua Voice, Inc. was founded in 2023, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and listed a team of 5 in New York City in Y Combinator's directory ¹⁹. Y Combinator's standard deal today is an investment of $500,000 for 7 percent of a company plus a later equity amount ²⁰, but Aqua has not published its own funding total, and the third-party databases we checked disagree with each other, so we give no figure. For scale, one of its rivals, Wispr Flow, announced a $280 million Series B ²¹.

Ratings are good but come from few users, many of them in Japan

On the US App Store, the iPhone app averaged 4.39 stars from 99 ratings on October 26, 2026 ^{24 25}. The Japanese store had more than twice as many ratings: 254 ²⁶, averaging 4.30 stars ²⁷, and the app ranked number 88 in Japan's top grossing Productivity chart for iPhone on October 19, 2026 ²⁸. Germany had 16 ratings ²⁹ and the United Kingdom 10 ³⁰. On Google Play, on October 26, 2026, the Android app showed 5,000 downloads or more and 4.4 stars from 78 ratings ³¹. Talk about it is modest too: "aqua voice" appeared in 7 Hacker News stories and comments in the 12 months to September 2026 ³².

Small numbers like these swing easily, so treat the averages as a sign that early users are satisfied, not as a verdict. Price and the cloud dependence, the two tradeoffs the rest of this guide measures, matter more for most buyers than these early scores.

Plans, word limits and what Pro adds

The free plan is a test drive, not a monthly allowance: you get 1,000 words once ¹, which Aqua says is about 7 minutes of talking at a normal pace ². After that you need a paid plan. Pro adds unlimited words, Custom Instructions and a Personal Dictionary ³³, and Max adds Realtime Mode and the "send it" command ³⁴.

Pro got more expensive in 2026, and Realtime Mode moved to Max

When 9to5Mac reported the iPhone launch in April 2026, the standard web price was $10 a month or $96 a year ²². In October 2026, Pro cost $10 a month billed annually, or $120 a year, which is 25 percent more on annual billing ⁴². Realtime Mode and the "send it" command have also become a Max feature: Pro and Team no longer include it, though subscriptions from before the change kept it ³⁴. Some reviews and comparison tables written before the change still quote the older prices, so check the pricing page on the day you buy.

Across the dictation apps we track, the median price is $10 a month on monthly billing ⁴³ and $8 a month on annual billing ⁴⁴. Aqua Pro now sits a little above both medians, and below Wispr Flow and Willow, which both charge $15 a month for Pro on monthly billing ^{45 46}.

Students pay 70 percent less, and fees are not refunded

Students who sign up with a school email address get 70 percent off Pro and Max, which makes Pro $3 a month billed annually or $3.60 billed monthly ⁴⁷. Prices on the App Store and Google Play may differ from these web prices, and one subscription covers Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android ⁴⁸.

Before you choose annual billing, note the terms: for subscriptions bought from Aqua directly, payment obligations are non-cancelable and fees paid are non-refundable ⁴⁹. To stop paying:

1. If you subscribed on Aqua's website, open Manage Account (linked at the foot of every page on aquavoice.com) and change the plan in your billing settings; if the change you want is not offered, email support.
2. If you subscribed in the iPhone app, cancel in Apple's Subscriptions settings; for the Android app, cancel in Google Play. Deleting your Aqua account does not cancel a store subscription ⁵⁰.
3. To delete the account itself, use Settings > Delete Account in the iPhone or Android app, or email support from your registered address.

For the short version of these answers, see the question Is Aqua Voice free?, and for the wider market, our guide to free dictation software.

What happens to your audio and text

On the desktop, Aqua processes audio in the cloud with no offline mode ⁵; on iPhone, the keyboard sends audio and relevant text context to Aqua's servers ⁵¹; on Android, transcription runs on Aqua's servers too ⁵². What stays on those servers afterward depends mainly on one setting, Privacy Mode.

Privacy Mode decides whether transcripts are kept

The privacy policy is direct: with Privacy Mode disabled, Aqua "may securely store transcript data" on its servers "to the extent necessary to improve the product" ⁶. With Privacy Mode on, transcript data is not collected, though session metadata may still be ⁵⁴. The pages we read do not say whether Privacy Mode is on by default for individual accounts, and the policy gives no number of days for transcript storage, so turn it on yourself and check it after updates. Business plans add Zero Data Retention ⁴¹.

Training is a separate question from storage. Aqua's terms say it will not use your content to train any AI model, or let a third party do so, unless you have explicitly agreed ⁵⁸, and the company says it did not use users' audio or transcripts to train Avalon unless they explicitly opted in ⁵³. Our guide on whether dictation apps train AI on your voice compares these promises across apps.

Deep Context reads your screen once per dictation

Deep Context is the feature that helps Aqua spell names and code the way they appear on screen. When it is on, Aqua takes one screenshot as you start each dictation, captures nothing between dictations and records no video ⁵⁵. It does not keep the image, but it saves the words it found with the session, like a transcript, and Privacy Mode redacts them ⁵⁶. If you dictate while a confidential document, a patient record or a password manager is on screen, that is the setting to think about first.

Certifications cover the company, not your settings

Aqua says it has a SOC 2 Type II audit report, ISO 27001 certification and GDPR and HIPAA compliance, and it asks healthcare users to contact it about a Business Associate Agreement before dictating protected health information ⁶⁰. Those audits test the company's controls; they do not switch on Privacy Mode or sign a BAA for you. Two other details are worth knowing. The privacy policy says Aqua never shares transcripts or audio with an advertising platform ⁵⁹, but its Google Play data safety declaration says the app may share personal info, financial info and two other data types with third parties ⁶¹. And the History tab keeps recent audio on your own computer for 3 days so you can replay or re-transcribe it ⁵⁷.

Before you dictate anything sensitive:

1. Turn on Privacy Mode and confirm it is still on after each app update.
2. Decide whether you want Deep Context; turn it off in Settings if your screen often shows confidential material.
3. For health information, get a signed BAA for your plan before you start, as described in our guide to HIPAA-compliant dictation.
4. For a team, use Business so you get Zero Data Retention and can enforce the settings for everyone.

The question Is Aqua Voice safe? gives the short answer, and our guide to on-device vs cloud speech recognition explains the tradeoff behind it.

Platforms and the apps it works in

Aqua runs on four platforms with one subscription ⁴⁸, but the desktop apps do much more than the phone apps. There is no Linux app: the platforms Aqua lists are Mac, Windows, iOS and Android ⁶².

The desktop apps get the best features

Deep Context is on every plan, including Free, but only in the desktop apps for macOS and Windows; the iPhone and Android apps do not have it ³⁶. Realtime Mode and the "send it" command also run only on the desktop, and the phone apps insert your text when you finish ⁶⁶. On the iPhone, Apple requires you to turn on Allow Full Access before any third-party keyboard can have open access ⁶⁷, and Aqua's keyboard sends audio to its servers ⁵¹. One detail suggests the phone app may be gaining offline abilities: the iPhone release notes for version 1.0.37 refer to an offline model download ⁶⁸, but the iPhone page still lists an internet connection as a requirement ⁶⁵.

Aqua lists 49 languages ⁶⁹. That is about as many as Windows voice typing, which Microsoft lists for 46 languages and locales ⁷⁰, and fewer than Wispr Flow's 100+ ⁷¹. A custom dictionary handles your own names, products and terms ⁷², the app's version of custom vocabulary.

Aqua is built with coding tools in mind: its AISpeak benchmark uses clips with terms such as Claude Code or MCP, and Deep Context is meant to spell identifiers the way they appear on screen. Our guide to voice input for AI coding tools covers that workflow across apps. For the platform details in brief, see Does Aqua Voice work on Windows and iPhone?, and for the alternatives on each system, our guides to the best dictation apps for Mac, the best dictation software for Windows and the best dictation apps for iPhone and Android.

How it compares with Wispr Flow and Willow

Aqua Voice, Wispr Flow and Willow Voice do the same core job: press a key, talk, and get cleaned-up text in any app. Aqua is the cheapest of the three on Pro, publishes benchmark results for its own model and, unlike Willow, runs on Android. It also has the smallest free allowance, the fewest languages and by far the fewest App Store ratings.

Where each one is the better fit

Aqua Voice suits people who dictate code, prompts, product names and jargon all day, on a mix of Mac, Windows and Android, and who want the lowest Pro price of the three. Wispr Flow suits people who want a free plan they can keep using, since its 2,000 words a week on desktop ⁷⁵ renews, or who dictate in a language outside Aqua's list. Like Aqua, it needs an internet connection to transcribe ⁸⁴. Willow suits people who want the strictest default: in its Private Mode, which is the default, it does not retain dictated audio, text or screen content ⁸¹. Our profiles of Wispr Flow, Willow Voice and Superwhisper, whose free plan runs local models on your Mac ⁸⁵, go deeper, and Aqua Voice vs Wispr Flow answers the head-to-head question.

Built-in dictation is free and may be enough

You may not need any of them. Apple's dictation on a Mac processes general text on the device and does not send it to Siri servers ⁸⁶, and Windows 11 voice typing works in 46 languages and locales ⁷⁰. Windows voice typing is free and built in, and for a few sentences a month it may be all you need, as Aqua's own Windows page concedes ⁸⁷. The 9to5Mac test, with 17 errors against 1 on the same passage ¹⁸, is one example of how large the gap can be. Aqua's own benchmarks compare it with other AI models, not with the built-in tools. If you dictate a few messages a day, start with the free tools in our guides to Mac dictation privacy, Windows voice typing and iPhone dictation.

If you need dictation that works with no connection and keeps audio on your computer, Aqua is not built for that. Yap runs recognition on your Mac or PC; our page on an Aqua Voice alternative sets out the differences. For the whole field, see AI dictation apps compared and the best dictation software by need.