Voice Coding with Emily Shea and Ryan Hileman

Mark Mirchandani is back this week as he and co-host Brian Dorsey learn all about voice coding with some great guests! Emily Shea, senior software engineer at Fastly and user of Talon Voice, and Ryan Hileman, developer of Talon Voice, tell us about Repetitive Strain Injury and how it led to the design and use of Talon Voice. Talon allows not only straight voice input but includes eye tracking, noise recognition, and user customization to perform complex actions like moving windows, selecting text, and user-specific workflow customizations without touching any hardware.

Emily describes her experiences with Talon, including the process to get started and how she looked past voice recognition stereotypes to find how useful the product could be. She demos Talon for us, explaining how the alphabet system works. Ryan types a sentence using his voice then explains the process of developing the alphabet and other parts of Talon. Later, Ryan and Emily tell us how they write code using Talon and the logistics of using the software at home or in the office.

We end the show talking about how Talon and voice recognition software have helped people with and without debilitating injuries and given hope to those spending hours on computers every day. Emily stresses the importance of adding accessibility to websites to accommodate Talon users and others with disabilities.

Emily Shea

Emily is a Senior Software Engineer at Fastly, where she works on the platform for delivering core Edge Cloud configurations. Because of a Repetitive Strain Injury, she develops using Talon’s speech recognition.

Ryan Hileman

Ryan was a software engineer for over a decade and in 2017 quit his job due to hand pain. He has since worked full time on Talon with a mission of enabling anyone to be equally productive for any and all tasks on a computer without their hands.

Cool things of the week

• How to find—and use—your GKE logs with Cloud Logging blog
  • The Stack Doctor videos
• Using Recommenders to keep your cloud running optimally blog

Interview

• Talon Voice site
• Talon Slack site
• Talon Patreon site
• Hammerspoon site
• AutoHotkey site
• Whale Quench site
• The Accessibility Project site
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines site
• Perl Conference video
• Demo from The Perl Conf video
• Strange Loop video
• Demo from Strange Loop video
• Ryan’s demo video
• Street Fighter video