How to dictate a hash for comments, directives and CSS ids
Say “hash”, “pound” or “hashtag” to produce # bound to whatever follows, so “hash include” assembles as #include with no space. Three phrasings reach it, which is more than most characters carry, because the same mark is called three different things depending on where you learned it.
A nine-word directive line costs roughly 10 seconds typed against roughly 3.3 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 “hash” before the thing it marks
Speak the phrase, then the directive, selector or comment text. The character binds rightward, so nothing separates it from what follows.
- 2
Say the comment text plainly
Speak ordinary English after the hash. Words outside VoiceGem's lookup table pass through untouched, so the sentence survives intact — though the hash binds rightward onto the first word, so one space needs adding back.
- 3
Use it for a CSS id
Say “hash” then a casing command and the words. The prefix binds to the identifier the casing command builds, giving a selector with no gap.
- 4
By hand
Press Shift-3. It is an easy chord and, for a single character, quicker than the spoken phrase.
Three names for one mark, and VoiceGem accepts all of them
Hash, pound and hashtag are the same character named by three different communities, and the table carries all three. Ten of VoiceGem's forty symbols have three phrasings; the rest have two or one, and the count tracks how many genuinely different names people use rather than any attempt at completeness.
Accepting a reader's own vocabulary costs the Deterministic Pass nothing. Every alias is another key pointing at one entry, so a table with ninety phrases behaves exactly like a table with forty-eight — it is just easier to speak to.
Where the manual way breaks
Shift-3 is straightforward and one hash is faster typed. Nothing on this page argues for dictating a single character.
Comment lines are the case that suits speaking best in the whole symbol family. A Python comment is one marker followed by a sentence of English, which is exactly the shape VoiceGem handles well — the sentence passes through untouched, so a whole line of explanation arrives from one utterance and the only edit is the single space after the hash.
Doing this somewhere else? a longer run through the speech-to-code converter, the at sign, the dollar sign specifically, or the same thing for the single ampersand.
Common questions
No. All three reach the same entry in VoiceGem's table and produce identical output, so use whichever you already say.
Only where a word collides with a table phrase. The word dot is the common one; everything else passes through untouched.
Yes. Say “hash” then the digits and letters. The prefix binds forward and the characters after it are not table phrases, so they pass straight through.
Dictate a comment line and see how much of it passes through untouched.
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