How to say an opening curly brace when dictating

Say “open brace”, “left brace” or “open curly” to produce {. The opening brace attaches on neither side, so a space is kept before and after it: “if ready open brace” assembles as if ready { — which is the spacing a brace-block language wants at the end of a line.

A twelve-word guard clause takes about 14 seconds to type and about 4.4 seconds to speak. (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

if ready {
	return true

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Step by step

1
End the clause, then open the block
Say the condition, then “open brace”. The brace attaches on neither side, so the space before it is preserved and if ready { comes out the way a brace-block language expects.
2
Start the body on a new line
Say “new line” then “tab” to drop into an indented body. Both are whitespace commands in VoiceGem's lookup table, so an entire block opening is one spoken sentence.
3
Close it when the body ends
Say “close brace”. Nothing is auto-inserted, so an unclosed block stays unclosed — which is easier to spot than a brace silently added in the wrong place.
4
Doing it manually
Press Shift-[ on a US layout, or let your editor's auto-pairing insert the pair and press Return to expand the body. For one block that is fast; for a file of them your little finger disagrees.

The opening brace is one of 21 characters that attach on neither side

Twenty-one of VoiceGem's forty symbols keep a space on both sides, and the opening brace is one of them. That group is mostly operators and block delimiters — the characters that sit between things rather than binding to them — and it is why arithmetic and comparisons come out spaced like formatted source rather than jammed together.

Braces are the clearest case for that choice. A brace that attached left would produce if ready{ and a brace that attached right would produce { return, neither of which matches how any common formatter lays out a block. Leaving both sides alone gives the conventional shape without any language detection.

Where the manual way breaks

Auto-pairing plus Return already gives most editors a good brace experience: type {, press Return, and the body is opened and indented for you. VoiceGem does not beat that for a single block and does not claim to.

The cost shows up in the languages that use braces for three different jobs. In JavaScript a brace opens a block, an object literal, and a template interpolation, and auto-pairing treats all three identically while your intent differs each time. Dictating the whole construct in one sentence means the brace lands where you said it, and the surrounding characters land with it.

Doing this somewhere else? the browser-based speech-to-code converter, the closing curly brace, step by step, the closing square bracket, or what changes for the closing parenthesis.

Common questions

Say “dollar sign open brace”, then the expression, then “close brace”. The dollar sign attaches right and the brace attaches on neither side, so the interpolation comes out with a space inside it that most formatters will keep.

Three: “open brace”, “left brace” and “open curly”. VoiceGem's table maps all three to the same character, so nothing changes based on which one you choose.

Yes. Whitespace commands live in the same lookup pass as symbols, so “open brace new line tab” opens the block, breaks the line and indents the body in one utterance.

Dictate a whole block opening and check the indentation.

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