A Viable Alternative to Typing

I’m thinking about writing a more substantive post about how humans work and how we can work better, a little like this one. As is common with these sorts of things, once I started to do research and pull on various threads, it turned out that the field was pretty deep and would require time to understand. But in the meantime, I just thought I would link to this video of someone programming using only their voice.

As I suffer with symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome, this is of particular interest to me. Once I watched it I decided to start looking at different voice recognition software so that I could still get some work done while typing less. I’m happy to say that even the default software for speech recognition which came with windows is actually very able and accurate. I dictated almost this entire post using that software.

As far as I can tell, Dragon Naturally Speaking is the gold standard in voice recognition software. It does come with a pretty hefty price tag, but it may be worth it if you have serious repetitive stress injuries, or as a preventative measure if you’re someone who spends a lot of time at their computer. And if that doesn’t work, chances are good your computer has adequate software pre-installed.