How to say a forward slash for paths, division and comments
Say “slash”, “forward slash” or “divide” to produce a forward slash spaced on both sides, so “total divide count” assembles as total / count. Paths pay for that spacing: “slash api slash users” returns / api / users, so a dictated URL or file path needs its whitespace stripped.
An eight-word division expression costs roughly 9.2 seconds typed against roughly 2.9 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
Say “divide” for arithmetic
Speak the operands with the phrase between them. The slash attaches on neither side, so division comes out spaced the way source is normally formatted.
- 2
Say “slash slash” to open a line comment
Use two consecutive VoiceGem lookups for a C-style comment marker. The two characters land with a space between them, so tidy that before the comment reads correctly.
- 3
Expect spaced paths
Dictate a URL or a file path and then strip the spaces. Every slash in the path keeps its surrounding whitespace, because the table entry is set for division.
- 4
By hand
Press the slash key, unmodified on every layout. Paths and comment markers are both faster to type than to dictate and clean up.
Paths and URLs are the weakest case for dictating with VoiceGem
Every character in a path is punctuation, and the slash keeps its spacing, so a four-segment URL dictated through the Deterministic Pass arrives with seven spaces that were not wanted. No amount of phrasing fixes it, because the spacing is a property of the table entry.
Saying so plainly is worth more than a workaround. VoiceGem is built for dictating code that is mostly identifiers with punctuation between them, and a path is the inverse shape — almost entirely punctuation with short fragments in between. Type the path, dictate the line around it.
Where the manual way breaks
The slash key is unmodified and paths are typed quickly by anyone who works with them. This is not a problem dictation solves.
Division inside a larger expression is a different matter. An average calculation with a guard against a zero denominator is a full line of identifiers, brackets and operators, and dictating it in VoiceGem gets the brackets and the operator placed in one pass. The slash is incidental there; the line is what you were speaking for.
Doing this somewhere else? our speech-to-code converter, the same thing for the asterisk, the caret, step by step, or the minus sign and hyphen.
Common questions
The slash attaches on neither side because its table entry is set for division. Strip the spaces afterwards, or type the path and dictate the rest of the line.
Say “slash slash”. The two characters arrive with a space between them, so close that up before the comment is valid.
Yes. “Slash”, “forward slash” and “divide” reach the same entry in VoiceGem's table and produce the same character with the same spacing.
Dictate a URL and see exactly why typing it is the better call.
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