Software Lets Programmers Code Hands-free 261
Yetihehe writes "New Scientist is reporting about a new speech recognition tool that promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard. 'The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI). This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles, tendons and nerves in a sufferer's arms and back. Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.'"
Re:Sure... RSI from "Programming" ;0) (Score:2, Informative)
Speechclipse (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.cis.uab.edu/info/Eclipse/SpeechClipse/ [uab.edu]
Why code dictation is so hard (Score:1, Informative)
Programming languages were never meant to be spoken. Consequently, it is very difficult to dictate code.
For example, to dictate the following C++ code: The programmer might have to say something like this:
"if open-paren Charlie uniform romeo romeo cap romeo echo Charlie cap-November uniform mike less-than max begin-capitalize begin-no-space off set end-capitalize end-no-space close-paren new-line open-brace new-line new-line close-brace up-arrow tab-key"
Voice Code makes code dictation simpler by allowing the user to speak in a more natural and easy to utter syntax. For example, the above code could be dictate simply by saying something like this:
"if current record number is less than max offset do the following"
This is both shorter to utter and less cognitively demanding.
Re:Repetitive Strain Injury (Score:3, Informative)
I can also personally confirm these claims. I worked in a bus factory for a couple summers and my hands would continually go to sleep at night after my 9 hours at the factory. Yet I have never had a problem from coding, even with weeks of 11-12 hour days.
Also, beyond all the other problems people have pointed out with using speech as input, it also interferes with the cognitive tasks needed for coding. Check out the article [acm.org], for example.
Re:Repetitive Strain Injury (Score:3, Informative)
I have occasional problems with RSI in my hands and wrists, but I do not have the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. I found squeezing on one of those squeezie balls you can pick up at the sports store helps, as does varying the position of my hands (and using different pointing devices), and especially, not playing games too long at any time. In my experience, that's the worst cause of problems for me.
Still even though my hands work fine, I'd love to check out the voice recognition software. I can think of times where that could be very useful.
Its all about the dictionaries you use (Score:3, Informative)
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.amiga.mis