How to dictate a dollar sign for PHP, shell and template slots

Say “dollar” or “dollar sign” to produce $ bound to whatever follows, so “dollar sign count” assembles as $count. Combining it with a casing command works in one breath: “dollar sign camel case user name” returns $userName, which is most of what dictating PHP consists of.

An eleven-word PHP assignment takes about 13 seconds on the keyboard and about 4 seconds aloud. (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

$userRecord = $request -> user

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Step by step

1
Say “dollar sign” before every variable
Speak the phrase at the start of each PHP variable. The character binds rightward, so it lands tight against the name with no space to remove.
2
Add a casing command for the name
Say “camel case” or “snake case” then the words. VoiceGem places the prefix and then builds the identifier from the run of plain words that follows.
3
Say “thin arrow” for member access
Use the qualified phrase rather than the bare word arrow. Saying “arrow” alone produces the fat arrow, which is the single most common wrong-operator mistake in PHP dictation.
4
By hand
Press Shift-4. PHP developers type this thousands of times a day and are unlikely to want to say it, which is worth being honest about.

Dictating PHP is mostly the dollar sign and a casing command

Every variable in PHP carries a prefix and a name, which maps onto exactly two VoiceGem phrases: the dollar sign binds rightward, and a casing command consumes the words that follow into one identifier. Saying “dollar sign camel case user record” returns $userRecord in a single pass.

One caution belongs on this page rather than anywhere else. PHP member access uses the thin arrow, and the unqualified word “arrow” is an alias for the fat arrow in the Deterministic Pass — so a PHP developer speaking by reflex gets $user => name and a confusing parse error.

Where the manual way breaks

Shift-4 is one chord and a PHP developer has it in muscle memory. Saying two extra syllables before every variable is a real cost and the honest framing is that it will not appeal to everyone.

Long assignments are where it pays. A line with two prefixed variables, a member access and a method call is four identifiers and five punctuation marks, and dictating it in VoiceGem builds both names from casing commands while placing every mark. The variables were always the expensive part; the dollar sign is incidental.

Doing this somewhere else? the same speech-to-code converter this demo runs, the at sign, how the hash symbol works, or what changes for the single ampersand.

Common questions

Say “dollar sign camel case” then the words. The prefix binds rightward and the casing command joins the following run into one identifier.

The bare word “arrow” is an alias for the fat arrow in VoiceGem's table. Say “thin arrow” or “dash arrow” for the PHP member-access operator.

Yes. VoiceGem emits the same character regardless of language, so shell expansion and PHP variables are dictated identically.

Dictate a PHP assignment and watch both variables build themselves.

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