He then kicked me out of his office for using the word “fucking”. The only referral he would write would be to a psychologist to help me “resolve the underlying issues behind my pain”. He would not send me for a second opinion from a neurologist, or treatment from any other specialist. My GP read the note and informed me: He would not prescribe me painkillers. After a brief conversation, he gave me my British diagnosis by submitting a note that he had no evidence of any physical cause, and he “suspected significant functional overlay”, which is how they teach you to call someone delusional in medical school. I brought my medical records from America, but my British neurologist did not read my records or perform examinations. Idiopathic is also Doctorspeak for “go away”.
#How to write computer code with your voice skin#
A neurologist performed a skin biopsy that led to my official American diagnosis of “idiopathic small fiber neuropathy”, meaning that I am missing crucial nerve fibers that transmit heat and pain but nobody knows why. After an initial assumption that carpal tunnel was to blame, a rheumatologist gave me my first American diagnosis: fibromyalgia, a word which is Doctorspeak for “go away”. People often ask for my diagnosis, but it officially depends on the country I’m in. The coder behind Talon, Ryan Hileman, is working on a suitable replacement but at time of writing, it is not yet ready. Unfortunately, Nuance has discontinued OSX Dragon editions that make scripting possible. My Talon setup relies on Dragon for the speech recognition side. For a Perl user, for example, a good starting point might be to borrow settings from Emily Shea:
The Talon community has specialized commands that take effect depending on application or programming language. Learning to dictate code is a lot like learning a new text editor very thoroughly, down to the challenge of customizing for your particular languages and needs. I have commands for searching, moving a cursor, selection, and manipulating the clipboard. If you are a vim or Emacs power user, this may all feel familiar to you. This unfortunate side effect exacerbates the difficulty of naming variables, which has been called “the hardest problem in computer science”. However, it does introduce a new challenge: every variable has two names, its written name and its spoken name. I therefore only have to dictate a particularly obnoxious variable name once. After selecting a particular phrase using my cursor control commands, I say “clip “, and every time I want to enter the same phrase after, I say “paste “. The most precious script that I’ve written is probably my indexed clipboard:įrom talon.voice import Key, press, Str, Context For example, just in the case of parentheses, I have separate commands for (, ), (), and ()⬅️ (which leaves the cursor between parentheses so my next utterance is bracketed).Įach Talon user has a number of personal scripts. Commands range from simple aliases for common symbols to complex meta-commands which repeat a previous utterance or change dictation modes. The star of the show is Talon, a system which makes it easy to write customized grammars and scripts that work with speech recognition systems to enable programming. I hope this information is helpful both for people with more severe limitations, and for programmers with mild repetitive stress injuries who can benefit from reducing their keyboard use. Many people have asked me about the stack that enables me to be productive in spite of this limitation. This is a very funny joke.ĭue to this disability, I cannot type or write by hand.
In relating this story, I often mention that for months before I learned to work without my hands, I had nothing to do but go to a bar and order a shot of vodka with a straw in it. I was interning at Google that summer about to begin a PhD in Scotland, but coding all day would have left me in agony. I could still control them, but every movement accumulated more pain, so every motion came with a cost: getting dressed in the morning, sending a text, lifting a glass. In August of 2015, my hands stopped working.
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