If you're one of the excited Elite: Danagerous backers, no doubt you're playing the beta's now. I've been watching all the Dev Diaries on Frontier's YouTube channel, their Twitch channel, and also a few ones created by players like me.

VoiceAttack will take commands that you speak into your microphone and turn them into a series of keyboard key presses

One of them showed off using VoiceAttack with the game. VoiceAttack will take commands that you speak into your microphone
and turn them into a series of keyboard key presses and mouse actions
(and do other things like launch programs!). It's pretty cool. You feel like you're on the Enterprise. It's fun once you've setup and memorised all the commands. It also makes it easier because you don't have to use the keyboard or remember what commands you've mapped to the gazillion buttons on your X52 Saitek flight controller. The game also supports playing with the Oculus Rift DK2 which is very cool, but it also means you can't really see the keyboard anymore, and that's were those voice commands start making a lot of sense.

Playing Elite: Dangerous with X52 and Oculus Rift
Tested.com playing Elite: Dangerous with X52 and Oculus Rift

Although I find myself voice searching on my mobile more often these days, it's still a bit weird talking to devices. Ok Google? However, after playing Elite: Dangerous for a while with VoiceAttack, I started feeling a little more natural with it. I was telling my sidewinder to deploy "landing gear" and to show me the "navigation" panel, "boost" those afterburners when I had a load of narcotics in my cargo hold, and "target" that idiot in front of us who thinks he stands any chance in an interstellar dogfight.

It's great fun. I highly recommend it. But it's not only fun, it's also very efficient. It's not like your sitting there, just issuing voice commands. You're controlling the ship with your joystick and talking to it at the same time; maybe even using the keyboard. There is a certain synergy that happens that increases the immersiveness of whatever you're playing or doing.

That got me thinking... wouldn't it be cool to have some keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio mapped to voice commands? So I created a new profile in VoiceAttack for Visual Studio. Here are the commands I've mapped so far.

Voice Attack profile for Visual Studio

You can download the VoiceAttack profile here. I should say that quite a few of these shortcuts are using ReSharper features and I also can't remember if they are the default keyboard shortcuts, so sorry if you have to faff about with it a bit. What it should do is give you an idea of what sort of commands make sense for speech recogintion.

For example, "go to" is mapped to ReSharper's "Go To Everything / Type" Ctrl-T shortcut. I find myself using this a lot with VoiceAttack. "definition" is also a ReSharper one and uses the "Go to Implementation" shortcut. "flip" and "back" are really useful when navigating code. "save" I say a lot now, too. And the best one is "test", which is ReSharper's "Repeat previous one" and runs the last unit test you ran. It's really cool doing TDD, modifing some code and saying "test" everytime to verify the test passes (of course if you've forked out on NCrunch, you won't need this ... me, I was promised by JetBrains that DotCover 3 would have continious integration ... still waiting ... but that's another blog post).

After the first day of coding with Voice ttack I found myself missing it the next day in the office. I couldn't help it but put the headphones on again and rotate that mic into position. It's really productive. It feels natural. I'm Harrison Ford in Blade Runner. It might be because I have a good quality, noise cancelling microphone on my headset, but you can almost whisper the commands. It's actually not as embarrassing as you might think.

Keep the voice commands short. One to two words. You don't want to have conversations with your computer just yet. That's another blog post.