Software Lets Programmers Code Hands-free

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.'"

Comments

Repetitive Strain Injury

[foundme]

If a programer has to say if-then as many times as he types, no doubt his mouth is going to get RSI.

Many people thought obesity is caused by junk food, but in reality is caused by having too much junk food.

So the best way to prevent RSI is to work out a reasonable and healthy work schedule that prevents such excessive usage.

Re:Repetitive Strain Injury

[g00dn3ss]

In fact, computer use has been shown in studies not to be a major risk factor for carpal tunnel. Here's one article from a quick google search.

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, for example.

Alright!

[TechnoGuyRob]

Pound include less than -- unf -- io -- unf -- stream greater than character return new line feed -- unf -- pound include -- AW SHIT ALL OVER THE KEYBOA--NO MOM, I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING!

All talk. Little action.

[Anonymous Coward]

"'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."

And now vocal cords. Now imagine this sytem in say a team environment. Everyone talking at once.

Really bad idea.

[serial_crusher]

My workplace is constantly bombarded by the sound of several Indian guys arguing about mundane stuff such as coding conventions and color schemes. I really don't need my computer thinking that's me talking.

Re:Really bad idea.

[Bloke down the pub]

Problem with C++ and other case sensitive languages would be also how the upper and lower case letters are entered.

For uppercase you just have to SHOUT.

failed compile

[Khashishi]

void calculate_offsets(Node *foo) {
      int dummy;
      double buffer[ Hey, Smith, what, are; you doing there;
      damn(it)->im.busy_coding.here;
}

E443 2:12 syntax error after [

Is actually for...

[x2A]

...finally being able to safely program whilst driving! Woot!

Would finally mean that people learn the difference between brackets, braces, and parenthesis\

For, four, fore!

[StikyPad]

"For x equals two two to"

FOR X = 2 to 2

"Erase word, erase word, erase word"

FOR X =

"Twentytwo to"

FOR X = 222

"Erase word"

FOR X =

"Open parenthesis eleven times two close parenthesis"

FOR X = ((((((((((())

"Son of a.."

Re:For, four, fore!

[DarkSarin]

I think this pretty much sums it all up. After all I recently played around with the voice recognition stuff built into MS office 2003 (that I didn't even know about until just recently), and found it to be amazingly useful, and rather limited.

After all, the word recognition rate is limited, and as soon as you start getting away from dictionary words you run into all sorts of problems.

how do you pronounce some of the function names for php (mssql_query? or maybe a nice bit of perl code? perl golf stuff would be insane!)

It might work for languages like RUBY with loose syntax (near as I can tell it doesn't really matter what you do as long as you stick with same style for any given block of code), but i doubt C code will lend itself well to such a monstrosity.

No, in the end, until we have a programming language that reads the way people talk, this won't work. Even then there will be issues.

Now, if I could just think the structure (or even better, the results) and have it appear on the page, I would be excited about that. Of course, there are lots of times when that would be the opposite of what I wanted.

Oh well.

Re:Not _Exactly_ Hands Free

[bcat24]

Heh, that reminds me of a UserFriendly strip. OK, here it is.

Voice recognition software: Welcome to Naughty Wibbling Dot Com!

Mike: Close browser, close browser, close browser, close browser, close browser, close browser, ...

Repeatative Tongue Disorder

[roman_mir]

Next thing you know, software development will be hazardous to your tongue and mouth in general.

Seriously though, I noticed that when I type, I express my thoughts in a more clear fashion than when I talk. I think this is because I am not distracted by the sound of my own voice. I can think faster than I type but not necessarily faster than I talk :)

Re:Repeatative Tongue Disorder

[TechnoGuyRob]

Next thing you know, software development will be hazardous to your tongue and mouth in general.

As much as we like to hope for "getting risky with our tongues and mouths," we're programmers; we know that's never going to happen.

Not the way I code

[litewoheat]

I don't know about anyone else but my code never really gets translated in my head to English or any spoken form and doing so would seriously effect my coding. When I'm in groove, I'm thinking machine not human.

Could be much improved...

[Pedrito]

I've actually played around with this idea. What you really need is voice, combined with keyboard and mouse and you really could improve speed of coding. With the lookahead that most IDE editors support these days, it's pretty easy to do symbol lookups which could be adapted to voice.

The real trick is with symbol names; variable names, method names, class names, etc. The problem is that these are not necessarily words that will be easily adapted to spoken voice, which is made significantly worse with hungarian notation.

But if you dump hungarian notation and use descriptive variable, method and class names (which is probably a good programming practice anyway), then you can probably get by pretty well.

Eat your own dogfood

[SirSlud]

And the programmers of this software didnt get RSI why? Its easy to avoid RSI. It seems like voice recognition software to help sufferers of RSI get back to work is tantamount to putting an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff instead of a big sign at the top that says, "DONT WALK OFF THE CLIFF"

Wizard of Oz can tell you how will this works

[rufusdufus]

Imagine you not only have a really good speech recognition system with a good language parser but an actual AI to talk to when you are writing your code. How well would this work? You can find out by getting a human friend to play Oz by 'hiding behind a curtain' and typing what you say in natural language. Try it. Then decide if a system like this will ever be useful.

Pen/Pencil/Marker & Paper

[erbmjw]

Am I the only code monkey that advocates writing out at least most of your code with pen{pencil/marker} and paper? It doesn't seem to cause as many repetative injuries, but perhaps I am incorrect in that assumption.

On a personal note: I've made my boss howl with laughter by informing him that I was on version 7 of the code related to one small project, but before I touched the keyboard I'd written out most of the changes on paper. It was even better when I showed him the scrap paper I'd been snagging from the recycling bins to do my design work on. I thought coffee was going to shoot out his nose; never had trouble getting a pay raise or vacation time from him since :)

When I mentored a couple of young co-op programmers they, at first, thought this practice was very crazy, but after they saw the benefits of having to thinking your code through while writing it out they started to follow this practice though not as drastically as I do.

How $` $] brilliant

[DysenteryInTheRanks]

I program in Perl, you insensitive clods!

Try saying $|++; $@?@^W--:!s/$#_/$_/g while <>; for 3000 lines !

My throat will never recover!

Re:How $` $] brilliant

[numbware]

It's still possible to code Perl hands-free. Try using your forehead. Trust me, you'll hit the right keys.

Re:Escape mode

[x2A]

ooo what about REGEX??!!

Tha's gonna hurt!

This might work with a decent programming language

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I'm not sure I'd trust a system like this for a language like C, C++ or Java with its icky grammar full of parentheses, braces, commas and other types of pointless noise. But it might be nice with languages from the ML family such as Haskell where the main bit of syntactic 'glue' is simply white space. Haskell code is pretty compact too, in the sense that there's less to type per 'concept' that you want to express, so it's ideal for coding when your input rate is less than optimal.

Re:Identifiers

[The Wicked Priest]

I can't wait to see people trying to pronounce some of the stdlib functions, not to mention some of the other goofy things that people generally use.

It will give new meaning to the "curses" library.

Re:Why code dictation is so hard

[Hognoxious]

"if current record number is less than max offset do the following"

This is both shorter to utter and less cognitively demanding.

And I bet it works, too. Now back to my code...

for i = 1 to numOfPigs
  if pig[i].altitude > 0
...