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"Voice Driven Development: Who needs a keyboard anyway?" by Emily Shea

Strange Loop Conference · 34.6K views · 2019-09-14 · 41:18

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

It is the go-to recommendation whenever someone asks about voice coding or RSI-friendly programming setups.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 6 months · HN mentions 2020–2023

Topics

Computer vision, speech & NLPTesting, debugging & developer toolsSoftware practice, open source & careers
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talon voicersispeech recognitionaccessibilitylive demo

What people said

cube2222 · 2023-02 · Strong recommendation

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]: [VIDEO] Disclaimer: not affiliated, just a happy occasional user

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glenjamin · 2022-11 · Strong recommendation

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. [VIDEO] The demos are in Ruby, but I could imagine that languages with strong type-aware auto-completion could be easier to do.

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tbabej · 2020-06 · Strong recommendation

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: [VIDEO] [1] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by Strange Loop Conference, played through YouTube.

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