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Comment by rafram | Hacker News Reader

This is cool! Some feedback:

- As others have said, "1000 tokens" doesn't mean anything to non-technical users and barely means anything to me. Just tell me how many words I can dictate!

- That serif-font LaTeX error rate table is also way too boring. People want something flashy: "Up to 7x fewer errors than macOS dictation" is cool, a comparison table is not.

- Similarly, ".05 Word Error Rate" has to go. Spell out what that means and use percentages.

- "Forgot a name, word, fact, or number? Just ask Aqua to fill it in for you." It would be nice to be able to turn this off, or at least have a clear indication when content that I did not say is inserted into my document. If I'm dictating, I don't usually want anything but the words I say on the page.

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> People want something flashy: "Up to 7x fewer errors than macOS dictation" is cool, a comparison table is not.

Respectfully disagree on this one: as a startup, you can't effectively compete with the likes of Apple on flashiness. However, the very target market of those dictating large amounts of text will include a significant number of people in academia themselves. For those people, Aqua Voice will feel relevant. Those who aren't interested in comparison tables will simply skip over them :)

One of my favourite nitpicks, but IMO 7x fewer errors means -6 times the error rate. Maybe error rate reduced by 86%.

Isn't it just errors_count/7? (errors_count * 1/7)

For example, if you got 70 errors before you now get only 10 errors.

7 times 70 =490. 490 fewer than 70 is -420. But words mean what you want them to mean, so 7 times fewer to mean 1/7th is becoming commonplace.

(edited because formatting swallowed asterisk for times)

Is there any case where your interpretation makes sense? Would you ever say 0.86 times fewer instead of 0.86 of the size?

If new is 1/7 the size of the old, then 7 * new = old. It takes 7 times of new_count to get the value of old_count. 1/7th of the old_count. 7x fewer seems like a shorthand, but I'm not a native English speaker.

  x times != x times fewer

7 times => multiply

7 times fewer => multiply by fraction

I would never say times fewer, because it is ambiguous.

When value is above 1, it's not really ambiguous anymore as only one interpretation makes sense. But I understand that it could still be incorrect, if it's not well defined term in English.

You choose an interesting case at 1. What does 1 times less errors mean? To me it means no errors.

It's ambiguous as it's not above or below 1 :)

Gotta put a back-whack in like \* for *

Thanks for the feedback! On the last point, you can't see it in the sandbox, but the app has a Strict mode that does what you're looking for

I was wondering whether the table actually comes from some paper, or it's just a marketing trick for techy folks.

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