Yesterday I found a preview of an add-in for the Visual Studio family which lets you add voice recordings to your code comments. It’s called VoiceComments.
Here’s how it works. VoiceComments basically lets you record your voice and inserts a special link to the recording into your code. This link is a normal text comment and a little icon left to the code editor indicates this line as voice recording. To play the recording, you simply click this icon.
VoiceComments can either be run in single or team mode. The more interesting part is the latter. In team mode, VoiceComments communicates with a central Web Service to store and load the voice recordings. So, you can share your recordings with other members of your team or listen to their recordings.
The creators of VoiceComments argue that their tool significantly improves productivity since developers don’t need to stop coding to type a comment anymore. In their opinion, coding and recording voice can be done nearly simultaneously. While I partially agree with them, I’m in doubt about the usefulness of this tool in real life. In my opinion, the main problem is the distinction between code and comments. I simply like having the comments in the code. You can easily look at them without the need to use an additional tool. VoiceComments may work in your IDE but what about using voice recordings in other tools? I, for example, sometimes take a look at a code snippet using the web interface of our subversion repository. It’s obvious that voice recordings are useless there whereas normal comments are as helpful as in your IDE.
Another problem I see is with the rate of gathering information. When looking at normal comments, you can usually filter out the important information very quickly. It’s normally only a matter of a few seconds to get the information you are looking for. You scan comments instead of reading them completely and this saves a lot of time. This is not the case with voice recordings. You simply can’t scan them. You need to listen to them carefully from beginning to ending, since you can’t know where the relevant information is hiding. Furthermore, there a lot of things, especially in the world of computers, which can be expressed more easily and accurately in writing than in speech. Just think of mathematical formulas or little code snippets. It would be highly impracticable to use these kinds of comments in voice recordings.
Nevertheless, this tool looks interesting. Unfortunately, there’s currently no version to try out since VoiceComments hasn’t been released yet. But there seems to be a beta test program for those of you who can’t wait to use it.
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