Spoken Language Support for Software Development

Software development environments have changed little since their origins as low-level text editors. Programmers with repetitive strain injuries and other motor disabilities can find these environments difficult or impossible to use due to their emphasis on typing. Our research adapts voice recognition to the software development process, both to mitigate this difficulty and to provide insight into natural forms of high-level interaction. Our contribution is to use program analysis to interpret speech as code, thereby enabling the creation of a program editor that supports voice-based programming. We have created spoken Java, a variant of Java which is easier to verbalize than its traditional typewritten form, and an associated spoken command language to manipulate code. We are conducting user studies to understand the cognitive effects of spoken programming, as well as to inform the design of the language and editor