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On Voice Coding

dusty.phillips.codes

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Re: On Voice Coding

#91

Post by eikenberry »

elorant wrote: post #65
Filligree wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use one of those at work, and a mouse at home. I like to think mixing up the motions helps, but honestly it's because I'm not nearly precise enough to game with a ball.

You can try one of the Kensingtons. The ball is quite large to allow precision moving. https://www.amazon.com/Kensington-Expert-Wireless-Trackball-...

I've been using a SlimBlade for about 10 years now and really like it. Spinning the ball for the mousewheel was brilliant and the giant, centered ball gives you a lot of freedom in how to position your hand on it. They are also have nice quality builds, I've only just had to buy a replace recently after many years.

Re: On Voice Coding

#92

Post by msluyter »

ijidak wrote: post #4

FYI, I thought my programming career was over due to RSI. Now, I only type while wearing long-sleeves. And of course, I still have to take regular breaks. I no longer suffer RSI symptoms. I'm guessing because it increases blood flow to the area and perhaps the warmth helps keep ligaments and muscles flexible and loose. Simple solution, but took a while to figure out. Hopefully this helps someone reading this.

Here's my submission to the "thing that solved my RSI but which is purely subjective and may or may not work for you" category:

I used to try to type with my arms/elbows floating -- not resting on anything. This seems to be fairly standard advice. For example, you can see it here: http://ergonomictrends.com/proper-ergonomic-typing-posture-a... I've had various doctors recommend the same thing.

But when I try that, the muscles in my shoulders/back get incredibly inflamed, and tension/pain tends to spread throughout my body, eventually to my hands/wrists.

Eventually I gave up on that, and now my elbows are splayed out and rest on the chair's arm pads. My hands rest on wrist pads, and my keyboard is split about 18" (using a Kinesis Freestyle 2). Basically, my hands/arms are nearly always at rest, and no energy is required to keep them suspended in the air. I also try to avoid "reaching" for the upper rows with my fingers, instead I move my entire arm forward to some extent to hit those keys (which is more a 'push' than a 'lift', because my arm pads have a bit of give in them).

I've had no problems since adopting this setup.

Re: On Voice Coding

#93

Post by russellbeattie »

Just want to point out a very accurate, yet completely inelegant solution to voice text input: Saying each letter and symbol individually.

If you haven't tried it, you'll think I'm crazy, but it's amazing how fast computers can recognize individual letter names. You can just blurt them all out. I discovered this while entering a domain name by voice - just spell it out and poof, no problem, no corrections.

Not sure I'd want to spend all day doing it that way, but rather than fighting with voice recognition for misunderstood homonyms, just fall back on individual keys.

Re: On Voice Coding

#94

Post by gitgreen »

pfraze wrote: post #20

I was curious what this might look like and found a couple videos on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBhBqlQj00Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGPNs5C1Lp0

Here is a very early(2007) and unintentionally humorous attempt to script in Perl with voice recognition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzJ0CytAsec

Re: On Voice Coding

#95

Post by mfrye0 »

I went through a similar situation and ended up using https://voicecode.io for a few years. It worked well enough for me, but I always found it hard using it in a public setting.

Ironically, I solved my RSI issue after coming across a book on HN. Everyone seemed to recommend the Mind Body Prescription, and after trying it, it did the trick.

https://www.amazon.com/Mindbody-Prescription-Healing-Body-Pa...

Edit: I've been wanting to try this project for several years now: https://www.ctrl-labs.com. I think something like this is the solution moving forward vs voice coding.

Re: On Voice Coding

#96

Post by 90litshi99 »

est wrote: post #63
melling wrote: post #2

“I type fast enough that I have never had much use for snippets in my text editor. Perhaps if I’d used them more effectively, I would not have developed the RSI symptoms that I have!" Often we have discussions about advanced code completion on HN. Many developers feel they don’t need it, or that it gets in their way, for example. Reading stories like this convinces me even more that our editors (tools) need to be sma…

I found that Kite is comparable with Tabnine, at least with Python. https://kite.com/integrations/kite-vs-tabnine/

the memory usage comparison is accurate for tabnine, at least in my case. local-only tab nine wasn't practical. and using a cloud server for an autocomplete seems unnecessary.

Re: On Voice Coding

#97

Post by keymone »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #87
keymone wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools matter. First ascent of Eiger’s north face took few days and team of 4. Last I heard Ueli Steck did it few years ago solo in less than 2 hours. Maybe he was better but not by that much. His tools were unquestionably better.

If better tools also make "worse" programmers (i.e., people saner and happier and uninitiated with the brain death rigors of struggling with awful/no tools), tools also matter more the better they get.

If a tool makes worse programmer, it’s not better I would say.

Re: On Voice Coding

#98

Post by lunixbochs »

gleb wrote: post #88
lunixbochs wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point all of the projects mentioned in this thread (caster/talon/serenade) have some option for supporting the three main (win/lin/mac) platforms.

How do you get/request access to Talon on Linux?

You can follow the Talon website in my HN profile to the Donate link (Patreon) and sign up for the beta tier then join the Slack to get access. Or go straight to the Slack and make your case for not being able to support the beta on Patreon at this time.

Re: On Voice Coding

#99

Post by bradenb »

AstralStorm wrote: post #41

This article could use a better title. Voice coding makes me think of audio compression for voice. This is programming using voice recognition instead.

I think this is a bit nitpicky. I figured what it meant pretty immediately but even if I hadn't the actual article would have cleared it up quickly.

Re: On Voice Coding

#100

Post by lunixbochs »

russellbeattie wrote: post #93

Just want to point out a very accurate, yet completely inelegant solution to voice text input: Saying each letter and symbol individually. If you haven't tried it, you'll think I'm crazy, but it's amazing how fast computers can recognize individual letter names. You can just blurt them all out. I discovered this while entering a domain name by voice - just spell it out and poof, no problem, no corrections. Not sure I…

You’re exactly right, and this is something I put a lot of work into! I designed a new phonetic alphabet - the “Talon alphabet” - (which isn’t proprietary to Talon, people have used it with Caster as well).

The trick is one-syllable words to represent each letter in the alphabet, but they have high phoneme diversity (sub-syllable unique sounds) and care was taken to ensure they can be differentiated even when saying them “too fast” in a stream without gaps, and I tested them extensively to make sure I picked words that didn’t clog up your mouth too much. The result is I can type 58wpm for short bursts using the alphabet alone, which is enough to play ztype, write entire words that would be hard to dictate, and control vim directly without an additional command set.

The base alphabet is:

air bat cap drum each fine gust harp sit jury crunch look made near odd pit quench red sun trap urge vest whale plex yank zip

Go ahead, see how fast you can read the alphabet in order. Then try reading it even faster, blurring the word boundaries together a bit. You can still tell the words apart!

Some people change a couple of words if they don’t work well in their accent, but the base idea holds strong.

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