Programming Out Loud
Writing software by voice can be extremely tedious. Code that would take a few keystrokes to type must be spoken as lengthy word strings containing hyphens, slashes and barely pronounceable commands. Alain Dsilets of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa is developing a software tool called VoiceCode that makes programming by voice a lot simpler. Instead of having to dictate tongue-twisting syntax, the programmer can use a simplified pseudocode. The software infers punctuation symbols from context, for example, liberating the programmer from having to utter every comma, bracket and semicolon. It automatically converts the pseudocode into working code in such common languages as C, C++ or Java. Dsilets plans to begin distributing VoiceCode as a free, open-source application early in 2002.
Keep Reading
Most Popular
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it
Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.
How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language
For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.
Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death
Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.