Caster VS dragonfly

Unfortunately Dragon development has mostly stalled for the last 5 years (Dragon 15 was a leap forward but that was quite some time ago now).

You can still make use of it via Dragonfly (see also Caster[0]) as mentioned by a sibling comment or by using Talon[1] or Vocola.

Having used a computer 90% hands free for about a year and a half back in 2019, I chose Dragonfly then, but would probably choose Talon nowadays - less futsing about and it has alternative speech engine options.

I also recommend looking into eye tracking: the Tobii gaming products[2] work well for general computer mousing with some software like Talon or Precision Gaze[3] - well enough for me to make a hands free mod[4] for Factorio, for example.

[0]: https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/Caster

so I found this thing called Caster today that miiight save my job. it does allow you to format code with Dragon and navigate VS Code (albeit poorly.) It's also open-source, so you can add features.

https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar

As someone who suffered some severe mobility impairment a few years ago and relied extensively on eye tracking for just over a year, https://precisiongazemouse.org/ (Windows) and https://talonvoice.com/ (multiplatform) are great. In my experience the hardware is already surprisingly good, in that you get accuracy to within an inch or half an inch depending on your training. Rather, it's all about the UX wrapped around it, as a few other comments have raised.

IMO Talon wins* for that by supporting voice recognition and mouth noises (think lip popping), which are less fatiguing than one-eye blinks for common actions like clicking. The creator is active here sometimes.

(* An alternative is to roll your own sort of thing with https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly and other tools as I did, but it's a lot more effort)

I've experimented with whisper. I don't know of a way to do commands without parsing dictation. Bottom line, the model has to pass 30 seconds of audio to my knowledge. So say if you're utterance is 5 seconds, you'll need 25 seconds of silence.

Depending on the platform you're targeting.

https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

What you don't have years of experience typing one handed? Oh well you'll become an expert now. Ive seen this tool used to program python with dragon naturally speaking, maybe give it a go... https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly

I have been coding entirely by voice for approximately 10 years now (by hand long before that). Most of that time I have been using the Dragonfly (https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly) library to construct my own customized voice coding system. The library is highly flexible and open source, allowing you to easily customize everything to suit what you need to be productive. It is perhaps the power user analogue to Dragon Naturally Speaking. With it, you can certainly be highly productive coding by voice. In fact, I develop kaldi-active-grammar (https://github.com/daanzu/kaldi-active-grammar), a free and open source speech recognition backend usable by Dragonfly, itself entirely by voice. There's also a community of voice coders using Dragonfly and other tools that build on top of it, such as Caster (https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/Caster).