Aqua Voice vs Hearsy: Cloud Dictation vs Local Privacy

Aqua Voice is a dictation app for Mac and Windows that sends audio to cloud servers for transcription. Activate with a hotkey, speak, and text appears at your cursor. It features natural-language voice editing and automatic context-aware formatting.

Aqua Voice won a 2025 Product Hunt Orbit Award (Readability Award for AI Dictation) and was featured by 9to5Mac. It grew from roughly 170 to about 1,000 monthly brand searches over 12 months.

In 9to5Mac's accuracy test, the reviewer dictated Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech: Apple's built-in dictation produced 17 errors while Aqua Voice produced 1. Cloud processing gives Aqua Voice more compute for accuracy.

Screen context for formatting awareness is processed locally — screen content doesn't leave your device. Audio does. The privacy question is specifically about audio, not screen content. This distinguishes it from Wispr Flow, which sends screenshots to cloud servers.

Hearsy is a menu-bar dictation app that runs entirely on your Mac. Press a global hotkey from any app, speak, and transcribed text is pasted at your cursor. No internet connection is used during transcription. Audio is processed in local RAM by one of two AI engines: Parakeet TDT for English (under 50ms latency) or Whisper Large V3 for 99 languages. Optional AI cleanup runs locally via Qwen 2.5 by default, with no API call required.

When you dictate with Aqua Voice, audio is sent to cloud servers over TLS-encrypted connections. Transcribed text is not stored by default unless you enable device synchronization. Privacy Mode prevents data from being used for product improvement.

Screen context for formatting is processed locally — screen content doesn't leave your device. This is a meaningful distinction from Wispr Flow, which sends screenshots to cloud servers.

For general personal use, Aqua Voice's privacy posture is reasonable. For dictating medical notes, legal content, confidential business information, or financial details, the structural fact that audio travels over a network to servers you don't control is a real consideration.

Hearsy processes everything locally — no data handling policy to evaluate because nothing is transmitted during transcription.

Aqua Voice advertises response times around 450ms, with text typically appearing in about a second on a stable connection. On slow Wi-Fi, congested networks, or during travel, latency increases. The 9to5Mac reviewer also experienced connectivity errors and a server outage lasting about 20 minutes.

Hearsy's Parakeet TDT processes English audio in under 50ms on Apple Silicon — local RAM-to-text with no network round-trip. Whisper Large V3 in Hearsy takes 1-2 seconds, still local.

For most daily use, Aqua Voice at 450ms-1s is fast enough. The gap matters during outages, on slow connections, or when you need dictation on an airplane.