“A new speech recognition tool promises to let programmers write clean code without ever having to lay a finger on their keyboard,”New Scientist reports.”The tool,called VoiceCode, has been developed to help programmers with repetitive strain injury (RSI).This is a common affliction for people who spend a lot of time using a keyboard or mouse and causes pain in muscles,tendons and nerves in a sufferer’s arms and back.Some estimates suggest 22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people, suffer from the condition.Standard speech recognition software can be used to control a computer but is usually of little help to programmers,says Alain D√©silets of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa,who created VoiceCode.This is because each symbol and function and every syntactic peculiarity must be carefully spelled out.VoiceCode lets a programmer dictate code in a more natural way,D√©silets says,rapidly translating their utterances into awkward programming syntax”.

Software lets programmers code hands-free