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Comment by russellbeattie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

How do you pronounce jury as one syllable word? I'm finding it difficult to imagine.

You could pronounce it as jree.

Like tree with a j.

Yes, kinda like that. Also see my sibling comment.

> 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

How did you settle on jury? Notably it seems to be the only word that is more than one syllable.

I think it’s more like more like 1.5 syllables in practice? I had a hard time finding a short word in the J space that was phonetically diverse but also didn’t clog the mouth. It’s worth noting that when doing the thing I mention where you blend the words together to go faster, “sit jury crunch” can be spoken more like “sitch ury crunch” or even “sitch re crunch” and still recognized fine.

And see sibling thread suggesting “jree” like “tree”, which is similar to how it sounds when you’re going quickly.

Edit: For people suggesting new words, please read my comments downthread. Also the biggest complaint I’ve had about jury in practice is it can sound similar to “three”. Not a ton of words are spelled with J, and when doing vim input it’s faster to use numbers or a repeat command than say the letter repeatedly. So as it’s a lower priority word to trim half a syllable on, it’s worth getting it right if you’re going to change it.

The alphabet isn’t strict law, but it’s best to replace individual words after you’ve had specific problems with them and not before, as it’s hard to match the phonetic feel.

How about "joy"?

See sibling for testing methodology. It seems good at face value to me, however I did stumble a bit when doing the full alphabet out loud test with it (joy air, joy bat, joy crunch, etc...). I think there’s a harder to quantify component that causes the stumbles/tongue twisting, that is where your mouth/tongue position ends up when you finish speaking the letter.

juke would work and not break any other phonemes.

Thanks for the suggestion! There are several rules and considerations in play.

For testing juke, I’d take a look at any words in the alphabet that could conflict with it on either side:

> 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

I see: cap, each, gust, crunch, quench

I’d say “juke cap juke each juke gust ....” out loud to test it. I’d also test it out loud against every word in the alphabet if it passes the obvious collisions.

Ultimately juke doesn’t pass for me for two reasons:

1. ook is something of a glottal sound, it can be awkward to reset your mouth afterwards when flowing into another letter

2. When chaining with some of them other letters in the alphabet it can sound like you’re saying “Jew”, and it may be confusing to some people if you are saying that repeatedly. “Juice” had a similar effect.

How about 'jilt'?

How about 'jug'?

Offhand that makes me suspicious of the jug gust chain. I’m not sure how often that would come up though. Maybe just in vim. One shortcut for finding words that end in phonemes I’ve already tested, is to find words with the exact same ending sound as another word in the alphabet, but with a sufficiently distinct starting phoneme.

Something to consider: replacing 'jury' with 'jug' (or some other one-syllabic phoneme) might increase overall efficiency, even if one or two combinations need a slight pause.

Why not the NATO alphabet? It is designed so the accent doesn't matter.

Because the nato alphabet is several times slower/more verbose and suited better for lossy radio links. We have a high quality mic hooked directly into our computer and the tradeoffs are completely different. Speed and vocal effort are more important than universality.

With good autocompletion this would work in many instances.

I’d like to save my voice from spelling the entire word. Often I don’t need to type more than a letter or two before I can select the desired variable, type name, etc.

This would go very well with APL.

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