Aqua Voice vs Willow Voice

Yes, and Aqua Voice now covers one more platform: it runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android, while Willow still lists Android as coming soon. Aqua Voice runs its own model, Avalon, with published benchmarks and an independent 9to5Mac press test, and Pro costs $8/month billed annually against Willow Pro at $12. Willow advertises 100+ languages to Aqua's 49 and a free tier with no word cap. If accuracy you can verify and price matter most, Aqua Voice is the stronger pick.

It depends on what you weigh most, and this page lays out both sides. Aqua Voice is the stronger pick if you want accuracy you can verify (97.4% on the AISpeak-10 benchmark, plus #1 among proprietary systems on the OpenASR leaderboard at its October 2025 debut), a lower price, or a developer API. What separates them is the speech model: Aqua owns and benchmarks its own, and Willow has not disclosed what powers its product. Willow is the better pick if you need a language outside Aqua's 49 or a free tier without a word cap.

Both are dictation apps that clean up speech and type into any app on Mac, Windows, and iPhone, in real time on the desktop, and Aqua Voice also runs on Android. The core difference is the speech engine. Aqua Voice runs Avalon, a model it trained itself and benchmarks publicly, and is tuned for code, AI prompts, and technical vocabulary. Willow names its model tiers Frontier Mini and Frontier Pro but does not disclose what powers them, and its accuracy figures come from its own tests. Aqua Pro is $8/month billed annually; Willow Pro is $12.

Both publish accuracy claims, measured in different ways. Avalon scores 97.4% on AISpeak-10, Aqua's public benchmark of AI and technical speech, and ranked #1 among proprietary systems on the independent OpenASR leaderboard at its October 2025 debut. 9to5Mac tested Aqua against Apple Dictation and measured 1 error to Apple's 17 on the same passage. Willow publishes a zero-edit-rate benchmark from its own testing (95% in English) and claims 98%+ accuracy, with no word error rate or third-party result. Aqua was not in Willow's test, so try both on your own speech.

Aqua Voice runs Avalon, a model it built and benchmarks in public: 97.4% on AISpeak-10, Aqua's benchmark of AI and technical terms, and #1 among proprietary systems on the OpenASR leaderboard at its October 2025 debut. Willow has not publicly disclosed what powers its dictation. It brands its model tiers Frontier Mini (free) and Frontier Pro (paid), but nothing is published about what runs behind those names, and its security page refers only to unnamed AI subprocessors. If knowing what transcribes your voice matters to you, that is the clearest difference between the two.

Yes, on both billing periods. Aqua Voice Pro is $8/month billed annually ($96/year), or $10 month to month. Willow Pro is $12/month billed annually, or $15 month to month. Willow does have the more forgiving free tier: it offers unlimited dictation on its weaker Frontier Mini model, against Aqua Voice's 1,000 lifetime words on the Free plan. So the cheaper paid plan and the more generous free plan are on opposite sides.

Yes. Aqua Voice runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. Willow runs on Mac, Windows, and iPhone and lists Android as coming soon, so the two match everywhere except Android, where only Aqua Voice ships today.

Yes. Aqua Voice launched on iOS in April 2026 as an AI voice keyboard, so you can dictate into any app on your phone and correct what you said by voice. Willow also runs on iPhone, so this one is a match. A cross-platform Pro subscription covers Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android together rather than being billed per device.

Yes. Aqua Voice has a SOC 2 Type II audit report and is ISO 27001 certified and independently audited, and it is GDPR and HIPAA compliant, with a public trust center linked from the site footer. Every plan includes a Privacy Mode, and Business lets you apply it across your team. Willow also says it is SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant, but its security page does not mention ISO 27001 or GDPR.

Yes. Business includes everything in Max, plus centralized billing, single sign-on, automatic member provisioning, Zero Data Retention, reporting, and shared dictionaries. It costs $19 per seat per month billed annually or $24 per seat billed monthly, with a minimum of 2 seats. Contact sales for 100 or more seats.

Yes. The Avalon API is an OpenAI-compatible speech-to-text endpoint at $0.39 per hour of audio, running the same model as the app, so you can put dictation inside your own product rather than only use it in an app. Willow lists no public transcription API, only an enterprise usage-reporting API.

Yes, it's what Aqua Voice is built for. Avalon was trained on the speech developers and AI users actually produce, reaching 97.4% accuracy on technical terms like programming keywords, framework names, and CLI commands such as kubectl. The desktop app also reads the active application to adjust tone, so it writes differently in Slack than it does in Cursor or Claude Code, and Pro carries a custom dictionary of up to 800 terms for the names it cannot know.