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Comment by mcrider | Hacker News Reader

Whoa -- Speech to bash commands? That's a pretty novel idea to me with my limited awareness of NLP. I could see this same idea in a lot of technical applications -- Provisioning cloud infrastructure, creating a database query.. Very cool!

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Cool indeed! While language-to-code (where code is a regular, general-purpose language) has only recently started to be workable, text-to-SQL has been a long running application/research area for semantic parsing.

Some interesting papers and datasets:

NL2Bash: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.08979

Spider: https://yale-lily.github.io/spider

Can they train it to write regex commands too? That would be useful

It is not a novel idea and I don't think it is practical. If the natural language was practical for bash we would already have already "list directory" instead of "ls" and so on. "ls" is just 3 keystrokes while the natural language option is 15, 5 times more.

It could be useful for learning tho (but at that point it could also become a crutch).

I was imagining more of a "list of files that contain word "hello" in them at least 5 times". Would be useful to easily write longer and pipe-chained commands, especially for people that don't use bash-like scripting on a daily basis.

But the character length would matter less when you can move to the speech domain.

ls is 2 syllables list dir is also 2 syllables with more meaning.

Ultimately, with natural language, the effectiveness seems to be when it is coupled with speech-to-text

It could be good for programmers who can't type and have to use voice. I couldn't use my hands much for a couple months, and the state of the art for voice access.. leaves something to be desired. If I lose function for longer in the future I'd need something like that.

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