How to dictate a plus sign, and why ++ needs the keyboard

Say “plus” to produce a plus sign spaced on both sides, so “total plus one” assembles as total + one. VoiceGem has no table entry for the increment operator, so saying “plus plus” returns two spaced plus signs rather than ++ — type that one, or write the longhand form.

A nine-word accumulation line costs about 10 seconds typed against about 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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What lands in your editor

runningTotal = runningTotal + amount

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Step by step

1
Say the operands with “plus” between them
Speak both sides of the expression. The plus sign attaches on neither side, so spaces are preserved and the arithmetic reads like formatted source.
2
Use “plus equals” for accumulation
Say the compound form as two words. VoiceGem looks each character up separately and they land adjacent, which produces += without a dedicated entry.
3
Type the increment operator yourself
Press the plus key twice for ++. Saying “plus plus” returns two spaced signs, because the table has forty single symbols and no entry for the increment operator.
4
Say the digit, not the word
Speak “1” rather than “one” when you want a numeral. VoiceGem converts symbols and casing and never converts number words, so the spoken word arrives as a word.

The increment operator is genuinely missing from VoiceGem's table

Forty symbols is the whole table, and ++ is not one of them. Saying “plus plus” produces two independent lookups, each keeping its own spacing, which returns + + rather than the operator you wanted. The same is true of the decrement operator.

Stating the gap is the honest option and the useful one. A reader who knows the limit reaches for the keyboard for two characters and keeps dictating the rest of the line; a reader who does not know it finds out from a compile error. The Deterministic Pass emits exactly what the table contains and never approximates the thing you probably meant.

Where the manual way breaks

A single plus is one unmodified keystroke and no dictation workflow improves on it. Arithmetic operators are among the cheapest characters on the keyboard.

Concatenation lines are where speaking helps. A string built from three fragments and two quoted separators is a run of shifted quote characters interleaved with identifiers, and it is exactly the kind of line where a missing quote produces an error on a different line. Dictating it in VoiceGem places every quote and every operator in one pass.

Doing this somewhere else? the same spoken-symbol reference this demo runs, the asterisk specifically, the caret, or what changes for the forward slash.

Common questions

You cannot. VoiceGem's table has no entry for ++, so “plus plus” returns two spaced plus signs. Type the operator, or write total += 1 instead.

Yes. Both characters are separate lookups that land adjacent, so the compound assignment comes out correctly without a dedicated table entry.

VoiceGem converts spoken symbols and casing commands only. Number words are neither, so say the digit if you want a numeral.

Check the complete table for the operators that are not in it.

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