Getting started

[AF]

Hello everyone, thank you for taking the time to read my message.

I have been trying to get my head around where to begin with learning how to code by voice. I recently have developed a condition which makes it impossible to use a mouse and keyboard, I rely on voice recognition software for basic computer tasks. However I have always wanted to learn how to code and I thinkpython would be a great place to start in terms of automating certain tasks and helping to streamline my voice recognition.

However as someone who is completely new to coding, and starting from a place of relative disadvantage doing it all by voice, I'm currently a bit overwhelmed with all of the information out there and have no idea where to begin with reading and starting to figure out what I need to do to get a system going.
I have started to learn python by simply dictating into  idle and the shell, however this is showing me that this method is of course incredibly time-consuming.
I have a Windows computer with relatively good memory and in order to replace mouse commands I have downloaded something called voice computer which puts numbers on anything that is clickable so I don't need to worry too much about mouse navigation. The main issue is with figuring out where to begin with regards to actually learning how to code and getting my head round all of the dragonfly and caster information out there is someone who is a total beginner

Totally appreciate this might be frustrating for the more seasoned of you out there who are thinking just go and read it yourself, I honestly have tried but I just have no idea because it's quite dense when you haven't learned much coding yourself so if there are any resources you can recommend for a beginner that would be so unbelievably helpful

[Shervin Emami]

Hi AF,

Welcome to the voice coding community and to the programming community :-) Sorry to hear you're here due to unfortunate reasons, but that's true for most of us in the voice coding community.

I would recommend you spend some time learning Python. There are tonnes of books, free online courses and video tutorials for learning Python. And you don't need to jump directly into understanding how to modify Dragonfly or Caster Python scripts, you should start out by simply using an existing voice coding system such as Caster. Use that to control your computer enough to learn normal Python. After you're comfortable enough with normal Python, including "object oriented python", then you can start looking at Caster and Dragonfly scripts and customising them to get more efficient use of voice coding.

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[Mike Roberts]

Hi, I was in a pretty similar situation to you a couple of years ago and I would definitely say that Caster is the best place to start. It will give you a usable voice coding setup which should be a good base. This includes a phonetic alphabet, easy access to punctuation, commands for formatting text in different ways, as well as grammars for text editors and programming languages.

You can see a basic rundown of some of the commands here:

https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/Caster/blob/master/CasterQuickReference.pdf

And installation instructions here:

https://caster.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Installation/

[Caspar]

Seconding this, definitely start with a premade system like Caster if you are new to programming, then focus on learning Python. There's a pretty active community on Reddit over at https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/ , and the associated wiki has a couple of suggestions: https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/wiki/index (in particular, some people recommended https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ as a free book to teach Python - I haven't tried that though).

Once you feel like you've got a basic grip on things, I'd suggest copy pasting one of the grammars in https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly/tree/master/dragonfly/examples or https://github.com/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly-scripts or https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly-modules/tree/master/command-modules (grammar files start with an underscore) and trying to make some basic changes to it. (You can also try making changes to Caster, but if you have limited use of hands then you need to be careful because breaking Caster when you're relying on Caster is very frustrating to recover from.) Dragonfly unfortunately is not particularly well suited to beginners and you'll see plenty of stuff you don't understand even after knowing basic Python fairly well - but by incrementally trying things (and asking in the Dragonfly Gitter - https://gitter.im/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly ) you will make progress.

Also I just want to respond to this:

> Totally appreciate this might be frustrating for the more seasoned of you out there who are thinking just go and read it yourself, I honestly have tried but I just have no idea because it's quite dense when you haven't learned much coding yourself so if there are any resources you can recommend for a beginner that would be so unbelievably helpful

Frankly if you suddenly lose the use of your hands then using a computer itself is super hard. Learning to program is made even harder, as there's only small scattered communities like this one around to enable that. As Shervin said, most of us can relate. So all that is to say, I don't think anyone here thought "well duh just go figure it out" when they read your message!

[AF]

Hello
thank you all so much for your responses.
This all sounds so helpful and I'm so grateful that you've taken the time to help out
I'm going to check out all of the information above and hopefully can get started.
By the way just wondering does caster put a huge burden on Dragon and memory or is it pretty straightforward? I've already got another program running on top of Dragon called voice computer which labels everything and I'm just wondering if I can use that in conjunction with caster. I guess there's no harm in giving it a shot and seeing what happens.
Thank you for being so understanding and I really am looking  forward to getting started with all of this
best wishes to all

[Alex Boche]

Yes you can use voice computer with caster. I used to used voice computer. If I recall, I found voice computer a bit glitchy but still cool and probably the best numbering software out there. Since then I found that eye tracking mostly works better for me. Also note that you can get help via the Gitter chats https://gitter.im/dictation-toolbox/dragonfly   https://gitter.im/dictation-toolbox/Caster   https://gitter.im/dictation-toolbox/general