How to dictate a tilde, and why it will not sit against its operand

Say “tilde” to produce a tilde spaced on both sides, so “tilde mask” returns ~ mask rather than ~mask. The tilde is a prefix operator in every language that uses it, which makes it the clearest case where VoiceGem's neither-side spacing default is wrong and needs a manual fix.

A six-word bitwise negation is about 6.9 seconds of typing against about 2.2 seconds of speech. (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

invertedFlags = ~ activeMask

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Step by step

1
Say “tilde” before the operand
Speak the phrase first, then the value. The character arrives with a space after it, which is not what a prefix operator wants.
2
Remove the space, or let your formatter
Close the gap after dictating. Most formatters will not fix this one for you, because ~ mask is valid in some contexts and a formatter cannot be sure you meant the operator.
3
Use it for paths the same way
Say “tilde slash” for a home-relative path and expect two spaces to strip. Shell paths dictated through VoiceGem always need a whitespace pass.
4
By hand
Press Shift-backtick. On a US layout that is a top-left reach, which is exactly why the character has a spoken phrase at all.

The tilde is the clearest mis-set flag in VoiceGem's symbol table

Prefix operators want to bind rightward. The at sign, the hash and the dollar sign all do — they are the three right-attaching entries in the table — and the tilde, which is used exactly the same way, does not. Saying “tilde mask” returns ~ mask, so the output needs an edit every time.

Publishing the flag rather than defending it is the right call. The Deterministic Pass is a table, the table is public, and a wrong flag is a fixable line in a file rather than an emergent property of a model. Until it changes, the honest instruction is to expect the space and remove it.

Where the manual path breaks

Shift-backtick is an awkward top-left reach and the tilde is a character many developers hesitate over, which is a genuine argument for saying the word instead.

Bit-manipulation lines are the case that favours speaking, spacing caveat included. A mask expression with a negation, a bitwise and, and two cased identifiers is dense punctuation around long names, and dictating it in VoiceGem gets the names built by casing commands in the same pass as the operators. One space to remove is a small price against four identifiers you did not have to type.

Doing this somewhere else? the same speech-to-code converter this demo runs, how the asterisk works, the same thing for the caret, or the forward slash.

Common questions

Its table entry attaches on neither side. The at sign, hash and dollar sign are the only right-attaching entries in VoiceGem's table, and the tilde is not among them.

Usually not. A formatter cannot be certain you meant the prefix operator, so close the gap yourself after dictating.

Yes, and expect spaces. Say “tilde slash” then the path; both characters keep their surrounding whitespace and need stripping.

Dictate a mask expression and see the one space you need to close.

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