How to dictate a blank line between declarations
Say “new paragraph” to emit two consecutive line breaks, so “done new paragraph next” places a blank line between the two words. One phrase reaches this command, and it is the only whitespace output in VoiceGem's table that produces more than a single character.
A sixteen-word pair of separated declarations costs roughly 18 seconds typed against roughly 5.9 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.)
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Step by step
- 1
Finish the first declaration
Speak the whole statement, including its terminator. VoiceGem emits characters in the order you say them and adds nothing at the end of a statement.
- 2
Say “new paragraph”
Speak the phrase between the two blocks. The command emits two line breaks, which is a blank line in every editor.
- 3
Continue with the next declaration
Speak the second statement straight after. Nothing carries over between the two, because the Deterministic Pass holds no state between tokens.
- 4
By hand
Press Return twice. For one gap that is quicker; the phrase earns its place when the blank line sits in the middle of a longer dictated block.
The blank line is the only multi-character whitespace output in VoiceGem
Five spoken phrases produce three whitespace outputs: a single line break from “new line” or “newline”, a tab from “tab” or “indent”, and this one. The blank line is the only one that emits two characters, which makes it the only whitespace command whose name describes an effect rather than a key.
Naming it after the effect matters when speaking. A developer separating two functions is thinking about the gap between them rather than about pressing Return twice, and the Deterministic Pass accepts the phrase that matches the thought.
Where doing it by hand breaks down
Two presses of Return is not a problem anyone has. For a single gap between two typed declarations the keyboard is obviously faster.
Longer dictated sequences are where the phrase pays. Dictating three short declarations with blank lines between them is one continuous utterance in VoiceGem, and stopping mid-flow to reach for Return twice breaks the rhythm that made dictating the block worthwhile in the first place.
Doing this somewhere else? our speech-to-code converter, how the new line command works, or the tab command, step by step.
Common questions
Two, which renders as a blank line. It is the only whitespace command in VoiceGem's table that produces more than one character.
No. “New paragraph” is the single phrase for this command, while the line break and the tab each have two.
Yes. Each phrase is an independent lookup, so two commands emit four line breaks with nothing between them.
Dictate three separated declarations in one breath.
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