Programming by voice first steps

Since my run-in with repetitive strain injury a year ago, I have been limited to about five minutes typing in every half-hour. This means most of my work has to be done by voice. You may think that working with voice recognition would be the most natural thing in the world! After all, we use our voices competently from a very early age. This is sadly not the case. Speech recognition engines are mostly designed to perform continuous dictation of text. Attempting to use speech recognition for anything more complicated, such as programming, is not easy.

I am still not able to work as quickly as I used to be able to. However, I have managed to do my job without damaging my health any further. That in itself gives me great hope for the future. If you are suffering with a problem that prevents you from typing, I hope it eventually gives you hope as well. I have written this document as a guide to the techniques I have explored over the last year. There are many pieces of software available to help with using a computer by voice in the fullest sense. However, finding them and knowing enough to configure them to work with each other is not trivial. Most of this software is free and much can be gained by searching the Internet and finding useful tools.

So, I imagine you want me to stop babbling and tell you how to approach programming by voice. Very well then. There are a number of things that you must think about and achieve before you can start coding. The significance of these dawned on me slowly and without a particular order. I hope I have made it more logical for you. Remember, my approach is not the only one. There are numerous people who program by voice and some of their techniques differ significantly from mine. You will have to decide what works for you.

Considerations

1. Decide which speech recognition software you're going to use
2. Understand the concept of the vocabularies
3. Know your macro language
4. Know your editor
5. Develop an editing language
6. Programming Java by voice using the Eclipse IDE
7. Other sites about programming by voice

Comments

Posted By: Ben Staniford
Saturday, May 15 2004, 09:47 pm

Feel free to add any comments you like. Please just add things which are helpful and would be of benefit to everybody.

Thanks, Benj..

Posted By: testing
Thursday, December 9 2004, 11:51 am

Testing

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