Software Lets Programmers Code Hands-Free

A Canadian research team has come up with a new speech recognition tool that will help programmers write clean computer code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard.

Estimates suggest that 22% of all US computer programmers suffer from repetitive strain injury (RSI), a condition that causes pain in the muscles, tendons and nerves of people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse. The tool, called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers overcome this condition.

Standard speech recognition software can be used to control a computer, but is usually of little help to programmers, says Alain Désilets of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, one of the creators of VoiceCode. Since computer code is more detailed than normal speech, each symbol and function, and every syntactic peculiarity must be carefully spelled out.

Désilets, a RSI patient, says that VoiceCode lets a programmer dictate code in a more natural way, rapidly translating their utterances into awkward programming syntax and will work with all the programming languages. Even though the tool is not as fast as using a regular mouse and keyboard, he believes it should help many programmers with RSI get back to work.

Désilets, who has been working on VoiceCode for a decade, now wants to release the software so that other programmers can evaluate it. But the installation procedure is not easy. “For someone who has trouble typing, that may seem insurmountable,” he says.

The project was presented at the annual Computer and Human Interaction (CHI2006) conference in Montreal. The presentation was done by Désilets with assistance from David Fox from Harvard University and Stuart Norton from the University of California, Berkeley.

Source: New Scientist Tech