Saqib from Microsoft is blind and demoed using Visual Studio at Build this year
Personally, I would like to say "Build", "Run", "Next Error", "insert line below", "rename function foo to bar", "Reformat file", "Reformat method", etc in my editor. Wouldn't we all benefit by having an editor that had some voice commands?
Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art in speech recognition is not quite there yet, especially when you want to use arbitrary identifiers like strncmp that can't be found in any pronunciation dictionary.
Interesting. Wouldn't speech recognition be marginally to somewhat slower in response, than response to keyboard commands, though? More so, considering that a lot of processing has to be done to recognize speech, not to mention the time to receive the audio input via the mic, do analog-to-digital conversion (assuming that is needed, not sure these days), etc.
"Set breakpoint on line 20" -- You had to reach for the mouse in your world?
But anyway, that's not really important, I agree that good "intelligent" speech recognition would be very useful for uncommon tasks. But building a project, searching and replacing are tasks that are so common that I can't imagine having to reach for the mouse to do them, much less pronounce them out loud.
And imagine the mess if you're coding in an open space and everybody chitchats with their computers...
Yeah, someone always mentions the noise coding in a group. Someone else usually brings up subvocal speech, or something else, but I'll leave that for you to imagine. We need a few more people to imagine what is possible rather than rehash why something can't be done.
AFAIK speech recognition is non-trivial processing (though not an expert on it at all). Just a few points: I've read somewhat recently that the reason why Google's speech recognition is good is because it does a lot of the processing on their servers, also because it has a huge volume of data to work with (from worldwide users). All I know is that there are various factors at play (even though I'm aware phones are very powerful nowadays). It was an exploratory question, not meant to suggest that it cannot be done or will necessarily be too slow. And I did say "marginally to somewhat", etc.
>Are you sitting with your hands on your keyboard at all times while programming?
Obviously not. As a programmer, I'm well aware that there is a lot of think time involved.
>Do you need to move the cursor to a variable, function, etc to refactor? You are assuming that we can only say commands that are bound to a key? "Set breakpoint on line 20" -- You had to reach for the mouse in your world?
Nope, no assumptions. It was an open-ended question.
Yes, one can be quite fast if they're sitting with their fingers resting on the keyboard. I wouldn't want to take that away.
However, I'm often sitting back reviewing what I wrote, and I'd certainly like the option of have my computer assist via voice without needing to reach for the keyboard.