Voice/Speech recognition software for programmers

Question

I'm looking for a software which will convert the speech to code. Now am specifically asking this question for users who are keen to program but unfortunately they cannot type for some reason and this will play an important role for them to step in the programming world.

General English recognition software may fail so they won't be useful as far as Programming is concerned. For example take this snippet from PHP ...

if($blow == true) {
   echo 'True';
} else {
   echo 'False';
}

Now how would you go with that? Speaking something like

If variabe blow is equal to true, echo true else echo false

Now the software may convert the string to boolean or vice versa. Software should be smart enough to decide that, yeah, user is saying echo so I should use string instead of a boolean.

So is there any specific voice/speech recognition software especially for programmers?

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It would be better if there is a general one, as far as specifications are concerned, than I would like...

• Should handle PHP, CSS, HTML, JavaScript (mostly web languages)
• Sublime Text 2/3 (If any plugin available)
• Windows 7 and above
• Should be Accurate
• Premium or Free

Answer 1

I have been looking for this for ages. Here is the best I have found so far: Dragon NaturallySpeaking, edited by Nuance.

• Windows 7 and above.No Linux, Mac OK but Windows version is better from what I have been told by Mac users.
• Accurate. I use it all the time e.g. now. I have tried English and French.
• non-free. To get access to all features you need the Professional Edition which costs around 500 USD.

Unfortunately Nuance doesn't seem to care at all about voice programming. More generally their customer services is poor (let's stay on concise and politically correct).

So users had to create third-party applications to enhance Dragon NaturallySpeaking's advanced scripting system to allow creating voice commands to perform voice programming.

The most popular are (all are free and open-source): - NatLink and Dragonfly - VoiceCode

Here is an interesting video/demo on programming by voice (using Dragon NaturallySpeaking + DragonFly). Nothing groundbreaking but give an idea of what can be achieved currently, which is far from what you ask: http://pyvideo.org/video/1735/using-python-to-code-by-voice

Summary

I dictate my code using a voice recognition system with Python embedded in it. In a fast paced live demo, I will code a small system and deploy it without touching the keyboard. I hope to convince you that voice recognition is no longer a crutch for the disabled or limited to plain prose.

Two years ago I developed a case of Emacs Pinkie (RSI) so severe my hands went numb and I could no longer type or work. Desperate, I tried voice recognition. At first programming with it was painfully slow but, as I couldn’t type, I persevered. After several months of vocab tweaking and duct-tape coding in Python and Emacs Lisp, I had a system that enabled me to code faster and more efficiently by voice than I ever had by hand.

The source code for voice commands isn't online yet, it should have been released in June or July on https://github.com/tavisrudd?tab=repositories (but from what I can see it's yet another conference's vanished promise).

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More ideas:

• How can we use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to code more efficiently? (which got closed by some mindless StackExchange users, which means the thread can be deleted whenever some admins feel like it! That's why I don't like StackExchange).
• What is it like to use PC Speech Recognition on a regular basis?
• What are some open source alternatives to Nuance speech recognition software?
• What are the main challenges when using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for programming?
• What are good websites to find commands, macros and word lists for Dragon NaturallySpeaking?
• What are good resources (websites, books, ...) for advice on how to optimize one's use of Dragon NaturallySpeaking?