How to dictate a line break in the middle of a statement
Say “new line” or “newline” to emit an actual line break, so “close brace new line const next” assembles across two lines. The phrase is distinct from “backslash n”, which produces the two literal characters of a string escape rather than breaking the line.
A fourteen-word two-line block takes about 16 seconds to type and about 5.1 seconds to say. (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 “new line” where the break belongs
Speak the phrase mid-sentence. VoiceGem resolves whitespace commands in the same pass as symbols, so no pause or mode change is needed.
- 2
Follow it with “tab” to indent
Say the indent command immediately after. Two whitespace commands in a row emit a break and a tab, which is how an indented body is opened in one utterance.
- 3
Keep it distinct from the escape
Say “backslash n” when you want the two literal characters inside a string. Confusing the two is the most common whitespace mistake people make when they start.
- 4
The manual path
Press Return. Nothing about a single line break needs dictating, and your editor's auto-indent fires on a typed Return in a way it may not on inserted text.
Whitespace commands run in the same pass as symbols and casing
One walk over the transcript handles everything. At each token VoiceGem tries a casing command, then a symbol phrase matched longest-first, then a whitespace command, and finally passes the word through — so a line break is not a second stage or a separate mode.
Single-pass resolution is what makes a whole block one sentence. A brace, a line break, a tab, a return statement, another line break and a closing brace are six lookups in one utterance, and the Deterministic Pass emits them in exactly the order they were spoken.
Where the manual way breaks
Pressing Return is one key and it triggers your editor's auto-indent, which a dictated break may not. For a single line break the keyboard is better, not merely equal.
Multi-line structures are the case for speaking. An import block of five lines, or a query builder with one method per line, is a repetitive shape where the breaks outnumber the interesting words. Dictating the whole block in VoiceGem gets it down in one go, and format-on-save fixes the indentation afterwards.
Doing this somewhere else? speech-to-code converter, on your own input, how the new paragraph command works, or the tab command specifically.
Common questions
“New line” emits an actual line break in the text. “Backslash n” emits the two literal characters a string escape needs. They are different entries resolved in different steps of the same pass.
Often not. Auto-indent usually fires on typed keys rather than inserted text, so dictate the structure and run format-on-save afterwards.
Yes. Both “new line” and “newline” reach the same command in VoiceGem's table.
Dictate a whole guard clause across three lines and check the shape.
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