How to dictate a Bash function, and what to type instead

A Bash function definition dictates cleanly and a Bash function body often does not. VoiceGem turns “snake case deploy app open paren close paren open brace” into a working header, while flags and paths inside the body arrive with spaces that have to be removed.

A ten-word shell function header costs about 12 seconds typed against about 3.7 seconds spoken. (sources: Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson & Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018, 168,000 participants, 136 million keystrokes; Yuan, Liberman & Cieri, “Towards an Integrated Understanding of Speaking Rate in Conversation”, Interspeech 2006, 2,438 American English telephone conversations (Switchboard corpus). The speech figure is conversational rate, not a measured dictation rate — no such measurement exists.)

Say this

What lands in your editor

deploy_app() {
	set - e

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, stored, or logged.

Step by step

1
Name the function with a casing command
Say “snake case deploy app”. Shell functions conventionally use snake_case, and the command joins the two words with an underscore.
2
Say the empty bracket pair and the brace
Speak “open paren close paren open brace”. All three land correctly, and the brace keeps the space a shell function header expects.
3
Say “dollar sign” for expansions
Speak the phrase before a variable. The dollar sign binds rightward, so a simple expansion arrives with no space to fix.
4
Type the flags and paths
Write command-line options and file paths by hand. Hyphens and slashes are both spaced in VoiceGem's table, so a dictated shell command needs more cleanup than it saves.

Bash is the weakest fit for dictation on this whole list, and saying so is the point

Shell scripts are dense with the two characters VoiceGem spaces least helpfully. Flags use hyphens, which arrive as - i rather than -i, and paths use slashes, which arrive as / usr / local. A single command line can need half a dozen spaces removed.

The Deterministic Pass has no per-language mode that would fix this, and adding one would mean detecting your file type — the guess the whole design avoids. The honest recommendation for shell work is to dictate the function names, the variable names and the comments, and to type the commands.

Where the manual way breaks

Typing shell commands is what shells are for, and every developer already has the flags in muscle memory. This is not a job dictation improves.

Long scripts with descriptive function names are the part worth speaking. A deployment script with eight snake_case function names and a comment above each is mostly words, and VoiceGem handles that half well — dictate the structure and the prose, type the commands inside it.

Doing this somewhere else? speech-to-code converter, with nothing to install, dictating Go functions, step by step, dictating Java methods, step by step, or what changes for dictating JavaScript functions.

Common questions

The hyphen attaches on neither side because its table entry is set for subtraction. Type flags by hand rather than fighting the spacing.

Simple ones do. The dollar sign binds rightward, so $HOME arrives closed up. Braced expansions pick up spaces from the brace entry.

The function names, the variable names and the comments. Those are words, which is the shape VoiceGem handles best.

Dictate a shell command and count the spaces you would remove.

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