"Voice Driven Development: Who needs a keyboard anyway?" by Emily Shea
Why Hacker News recommends it
It is the go-to recommendation whenever someone asks about voice coding or RSI-friendly programming setups.
What it is
Emily Shea explains how repetitive strain injury pushed her to program by voice using speech recognition (Talon), and gives a live coding demo. She argues voice-driven development can be pain-free, efficient and enjoyable.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2020 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec tbabej · 2020-06 · on “Ask HN: Is there any work being done in speech-to-code with deep learning?”
While (likely) not using directly deep learning, I found the following talk [1] by Emily Shea on her code dictation setup (based on Talon Voice) both insightful and impressive. EDIT: Actual demo with coding starts at 18.00: [this video] [1] [this video]
Strong rec glenjamin · 2022-11 · on “Hey, GitHub – Waiting list signup”
There was an excellent talk at Strange Loop a few years ago by Emily Shea about how she'd learnt to code vim using her voice to combat RSI. [this video] The demos are in Ruby, but I could imagine that languages with strong type-aware auto-completion could be easier to do.
Strong rec cube2222 · 2023-02 · on “Numen: Voice Control for Handsfree Computing”
It's worth mentioning Talon[0] here, which is a system for offline voice control as well, with great python-based scripting (and also supports eye tracking, though I haven't used it myself). Using your computer or programming with it works like a charm, with some interesting and impressive projects based on it coming out as well, like Cursorless[1]. There's a great strangeloop talk[2] demonstrating talon and the actual state of voice coding, which is how I discovered it (hint: it's much better than you'd expect, and straightforward to learn at that). [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK] [2]: [this video] Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a happy occasional user
Recommends cube2222 · 2021-05 · on “Squeezebox Keyboard”
Check out voice programming with Talon[0], I've recently been playing around with it (to be less reliant on my hands), and it actually takes little work to get started and fairly productive. The state of voice programming is much better than most people would imagine. Here's a nice talk on strangeloop by a person who switched to it permanently: [this video] [0]: [LINK]
Recommends 58x14 · 2021-10 · on “Spatial Keyboard Navigation”
I think you'll find this presentation by Emily Shea on voice driven development to be intriguing. [this video] aside, novel HIDs are IMO a huge market gap that I'd really like to invest time in if anyone wants to chat.
Recommends kbenson · 2022-01 · on “Ask HN: Why is there no high quality method for voice control of a PC?”
For anyone interested in this topic, you might be interested in this tech talk[1] from Emily Shea. In it she demos a tech stack similar to what's mentioned here, to fairly good effect. It does appear that required a lot of tweaking on her part and is optimized for the writing of code, and I'm not sure how well it functions for more general contexts. 1: [this video]
Cites lunixbochs · 2021-02 · on “Typing, RSI, and what I do differently”
My project, Talon, is free and cross platform. It might have some options that can help you: [LINK] Some blog posts: - [LINK] - [LINK] - [LINK] Some talks: - [LINK] - [this video] - [LINK]
Cites b2gills · 2021-06 · on “Try APL”
You can if you put in the work to set it up. There are two (nearly identical) talks by Emily Shea - Perl Out Loud [LINK] - Voice Driven Development: Who needs a keyboard anyway? [this video]