Voice-driven development: Who needs a keyboard anyway?

Description

Keyboards are the way almost all developers program computers, but this also means that being unable to use a keyboard for extended periods of time can seem like a career-ending limitation. Emily Shea faced that challenge a year ago, where every productive day felt like a step back for her health due to RSI. In what she thought to be a futile, last-ditch effort at saving her career, she turned to speech recognition as a way to develop software. Not only has she been able to get back to pain-free productivity, but she found voice-driven development to be enjoyable, efficient, and a source of renewed excitement toward programming.

Speech recognition isn’t exactly known in software development circles as a workable approach to programming, but it’s better than you (probably) think. Far from imposing a tedious workflow with a specialized set of commands, speech can enable flexibility and optimizations that are difficult to achieve with a keyboard and doesn’t get in the way when adapting to new technologies, tools, or languages.

Emily’s practical, demo-driven showcase presents the approach and tools that allowed her to continue her career. She dives into her real-world experience with speech-related topics like disambiguating homophones on the fly and teaching the voice engine new technical vocabulary. Beyond technical aspects, she divulges her experience guiding a team to support this working style and the challenges to adding a microphone into an open office environment.

Speech not only removes the compromise between health and career when an injury is present, but also augments and improves the workflow for a wider audience.