Voice Recognition For Programmers

Over a decade ago my fulltime career as a programmer was sidelined when I developed a Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). While recovering (a process that took years) I tried many speech recognition products. In fact, I was an early adopter, back when you needed to spend ten grand to get a system that supported DOS only. I tried Dragon Dictate, IBM VoiceType, and so on. While ok and very annoying for natural language dictation, these products are unusable and even more annoying for programming.

The issue is, of course, that programme code does not follow the grammar of a natural language. Now, help is on the way, via the open source project Voice Code, developed by the National Research Council of Canada. This New Scientist article contains a few more details, plus links to discussion forums.

Of special note is the fact that the current version was written to support Python, since the clean and simple syntax lends itself especially well to verbal interpretation.

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