Vito vs Aqua Voice

Aqua Voice is one of the newer, well-funded AI dictation apps: fast, polished, and genuinely good at technical and coding vocabulary. Vito does the same core job — speak, get clean text anywhere — but takes the opposite side on almost every choice: free and open instead of a subscription, on Linux, and zero-cost locally or paid by the hour in the cloud. Here is an honest account of where each one wins, written by the people who make Vito and checked against Aqua's own pages.

At a glance

Checked against aquavoice.com and its pricing page in October 2026.

Where Aqua Voice is the better choice

You want it on your phone too

Aqua has apps for iPhone and, since October 2026, Android, and one subscription covers Mac, Windows and both phones. Vito has no phone app: its browser version works on a phone or tablet, but only through the clipboard and without a hotkey. Between your computers, Vito Sync keeps your history and dictionary the same through a folder your own sync app already handles, with no account — but that is desktop to desktop, not your phone. If dictating on the move matters, that settles it.

You want it working in the next two minutes

Download, sign in, dictate. Aqua makes every provider choice for you, and the text lands wherever your cursor is. Vito's quickest start is its browser version — nothing to install, no account, an 18 MB speech model downloaded once — but there the text goes to your clipboard and the hotkey only works while the tab has focus. To have Vito type straight into other apps you install it and pick an engine and a cleanup style, which is more decisions than Aqua asks of you.

You dictate code and technical prose

This is Aqua's real strength and worth naming plainly. It reads on-screen context (Aqua calls it Deep Context) to get syntax, symbols and technical terms right, which is exactly where general dictation tends to fall apart. If a lot of what you dictate is code or jargon, that is a genuine advantage Vito does not match.

You would rather one predictable bill

A subscription is a fixed, known number every month and includes the service. Vito has no running cost locally, while optional cloud use varies with what you dictate. Some people simply prefer one flat fee, and that is a fair preference.

You are buying for a team

Aqua's Business plan — $19 a seat a month billed annually, or $24 monthly, from two seats — adds SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning, enforced zero data retention and shared team dictionaries. Vito has nothing like that on offer, and if your IT department needs those boxes ticked, Aqua is the one that ticks them.

Where Vito is the better choice

You want local privacy without giving up provider choice

Vito has two built-in local engines for private, zero-usage-cost speech-to-text: Whistle, an 18 MB download that shows the text live while you speak in seven languages, and Parakeet, which Vito installs and manages, in 25. Or point transcription at any local or remote OpenAI-compatible endpoint — Whisper and Parakeet included. Cleanup is equally flexible, with five built-in styles such as Business, Verbatim and Notes, plus your own prompts.

You are on Linux

Aqua does not run on Linux. Vito does, and goes further than most: it detects missing system utilities, explains hotkey setup per desktop environment, and gives niri and Hyprland users ready-to-copy bindings. For a Linux user this is the clearest difference between the two.

The cost, if you dictate a normal amount

Vito can cost nothing to run locally. With typical cloud providers it costs about €0.15 per hour of speech. Aqua Pro is $8 a month billed annually — roughly $96 a year, whether you dictate or not — or $10 month to month. You would have to speak for something like fifty hours in a month before Vito's usage cost caught up with that, and if you use it less, the gap only widens. The simplest free start is local — Whistle or Parakeet — or Vito in your browser, with nothing to install. If you would rather use the cloud, pair AssemblyAI's free starting credit with Groq's free tier and that runs at no cost too, no card required.

You want a say in which AI cleans your text

Aqua's refinement is Aqua's, take it or leave it. Vito's cleanup step talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so you choose the model that rewrites what you said — a frontier model when you want the best result, or a local LLM on your own machine when you would rather that step never leave it. Pair that with local Whistle or Parakeet and the complete dictation pipeline stays on-device.

You want to read the code, and own your keys

Vito is open source, so its privacy claims are checkable rather than promised. It has no account, your keys stay on your machine and are yours to use elsewhere, and there is nothing to cancel. Aqua is closed source and account-based, and keeps a transcript history; to their credit, its Privacy Mode stores nothing on their servers, and Business enforces zero data retention. But with Vito you can read exactly what happens instead of taking anyone's word.

Ask the AI anything by voice, not just edit

Aqua is strong at voice-driven editing — rephrase, shorten, tidy. Vito's Vito Assist goes wider: as well as editing, you can ask it things. "Vito, translate the clipboard to Spanish", "Vito, what's the capital of France?", "Vito, 15% of 240?" — questions, translations, maths and definitions, all spoken and answered in place, on your own key and model.

It is quite good fun

A small thing, and we are not going to pretend it decides anything. Vito keeps count on a dashboard you arrange yourself: words dictated, hours of typing you did not have to do, a chart of your week, a calendar of the last six months and a streak of days in a row — beat your record and the card celebrates. Vito himself, the logo with a face, chats along while you dictate. There are 50+ achievements to unlock along the way, some of them silly, several of them hidden.

It turns out to matter more than it sounds like it should. Dictating instead of typing is a habit you have to build, and the first week is the awkward part — seeing "1 h 38 m of typing saved" is a nudge to keep going that a blank window does not give you. If that sounds like a gimmick to you, ignore it entirely; nothing depends on it.

About that free tier

Aqua's free plan is 1,000 words, one time — a taste, not a tier. It is enough to see whether you like it, which is a fair way to try something, but it runs out fast and the next step up from there is a subscription.

What they both do

Both put finished text — not a raw transcript — wherever your cursor is, in any application, from a single hotkey, cleaning up the hesitations and the false starts as they go. Both run on Mac and Windows. If that core is all you need, Aqua is an excellent version of it — the differences above are about everything around it.

So which one

• On your phone? Aqua, on iPhone and Android. Vito has no phone app; its browser version only reaches the clipboard.
• On a Mac? Either — decide on price and openness, not platform.
• On Linux? Vito, by default.
• Dictating a lot of code? Aqua's context awareness is a real edge.
• Want the lowest cost, or free? Vito.
• Want open source and no account? Vito.
• Prefer one flat monthly bill and no choices to make? Aqua.
• Just want to try dictation right now, with nothing to install? Vito, in your browser.