Art of chording
artofchording.com
artofchording.com
That being said, I greatly encourage anyone to try it out. Typing using chords is so satisfying! If you're looking for a cheap dedicated steno keyboard, take a look at the Georgi [1].
If you write a lot, about what amount of writing do you think it can in the pay back the initial time investment?
Now, when I sit down to write a page for my thesis, I'm faaarrr below the that 70 WPM, since those thought are even harder to sort in my mind.
Clearly, I'd be served by writing handwritten drafts, etc..., but I really think Steno probably only shines when taking dictations or typing up someones notes they've written.
For the keyboard shortcut, I use "FEFK" which is default in the Plover dictionary.
That makes him about as fast as a 300 baud modem. And probably around 1.8x the fastest keyboard typists.
Edit: Curious if this as "optimized" as it can be. Is there a theoretically faster way to get words from your hands to something digital?
I'm also curious how this works for court cases where a language other than English comes into play, alongside English. Canada might be a good example, where French and English dialogue might often co-exist.
The related Penti-Chorded keyboard apparently works fairly well for German [0], and Japanese Kanji [1]. I'd imagine that using the arpeggio to shift the characters would work similarly with the steno.
For the sake of, err, discussion, I can envision some sort of wearable glove like input device. I know I can play notes on a guitar far faster than he is inputting characters because of the technique involved. I feel like it could be possible to come up with a faster method playing around with that idea.
But the ultimate would be hands free, no? Makes one wonder if this is yet another skill/job about to be blown away by automation.
Offline speech recognition with perfect accuracy will probably come standard with every phone in a couple of years.
I wonder if there's a blind stenographer that can really fly, but just isn't well known.
I bet there are some unknown talents in the closed captioning space.
Unrelated, I've seen some interesting typos there, especially with strong English accents like Scottish or Irish. And you can see them improving as episodes progress. The "RedRock" Irish soap is a good example. They get much better over time.
Sounds like the perfect instrument for Steno Hero: https://killscreen.com/previously/articles/steno-hero-might-...
Half the speed.
If I remember correctly, just to get his license he had to hit 270w/m. He said he can get up to about 300w/m.
The raw transcripts are composed of shorthand codes, and letters that represent syllables and other components of speech. I saw that many words were just represented by one or a few letters. So, by "words", we are often talking about codes of only a few letters. They are printed on thermal receipt width paper, and floppy disk (this was about 15 years ago).
> I'm also curious how this works for court cases where a language other than English comes into play, alongside English. Canada might be a good example, where French and English dialogue might often co-exist.
It shouldn't matter what language it is, because the stenographer has their own custom shorthand dictionary. The raw transcript that they generate is for the stenographers internal use. Only after the trail do they transcribe it into human readable form. Lawyers then have to pay the stenographer a fee for their transcripts. My uncle told me that it is common for multiple lawyers to each pay him a fee that he charges by the page.
He, like most court reporters, outsources their transcription to other people via Email. It requires human transcription, because the raw transcripts need to be interpreted. It is not a something that you can just run through a filter. His scopists[1] will email him back and fourth for clarification on parts of the transcript they don't understand. This is important, because their transcripts are the official legal record of what happened in a trial.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopist [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand
I know that when my uncle started in the early 90s, there were still some court reporters that used shorthand with pencil and paper. I don't think there is a requirement that they use a steno machine. Their job isn't to record what happened, their job is to generate a single authoritative transcript that everyone works from. In theory, they could probably not take notes at all, and just work from the recording later, but it is probably easier to take the first round of notes live.
When a court reporter generates a transcript, they sometimes have to go back through the audio recordings sometimes and actually clarify in the official transcript exactly what was said. They have to make it clear in the transcript if people were talking over each other, or to try to clarify what exactly was said if it might be ambiguous.
I think it is a good idea for a trial to have an official record that has been processed by a human, instead of just throwing a recording up and calling it a day.
Think of how inefficient it would be otherwise, where all of the parties would essentially have to act as their own court reporters and generate their own transcripts.
What if different parties disagreed with the interpretation of the transcripts? Perhaps the court would then have to appoint a neutral expert to make an authoritative determination of what was said; and we've now re-invented the court-reporter role.
I think there is a tendency for people to look at this only as a technical problem to be solved. Like with voting, it isn't just a matter of securely tallying votes, there is much more to it. The process requires maximizing transparency and minimizing room for anyone to contest it.
One of my best clients was middle-aged mother of three - let's call her Pat, because that's close enough - whose home IT setup always needed a lot of extra love. Weird viruses on old machines, ancient printers that had to be coaxed to work well when shared over a network, "what laptop should I buy my son for college" - the usual.
She was a court reporter, by trade. I had to help her with her laptop and court reporting software / hardware from time to time - it was very interesting. She had a custom "keyboard" that only had 10-15 unlabeled keys that really looked more like long and thin paddles than anything else; it worked with a program that recorded audio and tracked it to her inputs.
So she could wind the report back to any given point in time, and it would highlight what she'd typed as it went. So if she needed clarification on something - she could enable audio playback that showed what she had transcribed, not unlike a karaoke machine.
It was all very interesting stuff. I was a little sad when I had to tell her that I couldn't do work for her anymore, because I didn't have the time to do side work due to a developing career and social life.
Interesting in any case.
especially if someone points at someone else or uses other means of communication. Of course the judge can then say what was communicated so there is a verbal record in the recording but it is probably better that the court reporter is there in that case.
There are literally "Steno Masks," a sound-dampening mask that fits over your lower face that you can use to repeat whats being said, clearly and quietly, to transcription software on your computer (along with formatting notes and the identities of speakers.) Stenographers aren't required to use a stenotype, they're required to produce an accurate transcript of the proceedings, and to be able to read back what was recently said. If you come up with a system that does that more efficiently, put it into action and take the profit.
The methods used are defined by their efficiency. This is a thread about discussing people who can type faster and more accurately than one would imagine possible, and easily better than current machine performance.
I'm fine with lawyers using software to optimize their work. But I don't ever want to replace lawyers themselves. I can understand the temptation to create a law AI, since so much of what lawyers do is systematic and procedural. I still want a licensed lawyer to review and sign off on any arguments.
Also, they witnessed what happened in the court room first hand, which is helpful.
While you could certainly improve training for a team of outsourced stenographers, I think most people would feel safer knowing that the person generating the transcript is closely connected with the court, and not just a team of anonymous replaceable people in another country who didn't see the trial, and may only have access to portions of it.
What is the real benefit? It's debatable whether any money would even be saved, paying several people in a developing country less than the salary of a single court reporter. And it introduces all sorts of new liabilities and complications.
Personally, I can't see the cost savings really being worth it. The court reporter is hardly the most expensive part of a trial. I get nervous enough outsourcing my voicemail transcription to anonymous humans, so I can't imagine trial transcripts.
The thing though that I think most people miss, is that this is far more than a technical problem. The courts are an instrument of civil society, and they need to be held to really strict standards. Legal procedures took centuries to evolve, so that people will accept them and time is not wasted re-inventing procedures. This is so much more important than any optimizations that could be introduced. And if it becomes too opaque and complicated, it loses any value because people need to be able to trust it.
This over-optimization attitude can be a real problem for society. I am worried that silicon valley will try to "solve" this problem for us.
It is bad enough that this "move fast and break things, bro" culture is going after our voting machines and our nuclear missile silos.
Source: I saw it at an Angular conference in London three years or so ago.
One interesting bit for nerds: those people study up on different topics (law, programming etc) to customize their dictionaries and get it correct every time.
Many European languages use a form of orthographic stenography instead. This is perhaps a tiny bit less efficient, but makes up for it with flexibility in spades.
I started working on a computer implementation of that, but sadly life got in the way. If there was any project I could be paid to continue work on, I would want it to be this. https://github.com/kqr/qweyboard/
> I'm a programmer who uses stenography in my everyday work. Coworkers often come to my desk to chat or ask questions, not knowing that I use a steno machine to program and type. As I start typing in front of them, they'll watch as words and symbols appear in bursts, faster than they've ever seen anyone type before. Then, confused, they'll look down at my hands to see how I can possibly move that fast and see the reduced keyboard layout that I'm typing on, which always leads to more questions.
Would be really interesting to know how exactly they use steno for writing code. Also imagine using a keyboard that looks like this [0]
[0] https://www.artofchording.com/introduction/how-steno-works.h...
> The dictionary is customizable. As the English language develops and new words are created, the stenographer can add them to their dictionary. This is critical for anyone writing jargon, complex terminology, or programming languages
I'd love ideas on how to demonstrate coding in steno. I struggle with it sometimes because the slowest part about coding is not the input rate… it's the brain. I guess if people are looking to code "quicker"… it's not the rate of input that one would want to explore. I will say that writing comments became a lot easier when the words started to just flow onto the screen.
Here are my existing videos:
Unscripted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711T2simRyI
Scripted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w
Looking forward to any suggestions on how to improve or even just the big open questions you'd want answered on this subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_01ha1uS6Y https://www.software-lab.de/penti.html
Does his development work on a tablet with a chorded keyboard software.
The thing that’s still a question for me is variable names. How does one steno out snake_case or CamelCase?
You can also do a stroke-by-stroke basis. For example, I have strokes for prefix "is" and "on" followed by a capital. So
"A*UN SMIT"
"ON KPA* SMIT"While writing lisp code in classic editors, you already shouldn't be editing or navigating code with classic commands, instead you will be using structured editing.
Of course it isn't limited to lisp, but languages with C-like syntax are harder to use for structured editing.
I highly recommend watching this video, where the speaker uses voice commands to write both in emacs-lisp and in python.
One of the reasons I got it was actually how appealing the alternate mouse inputs were.
I tend to "collect" dexterity-based hobbies, so ymmv, but I found it pretty fun and satisfying to pick up. I'm completely out of practice now (new baby and wfh sucked up a bit more of my free time) but might just pick it back up anyways.
Writing as I think is like climbing with a rope. I don't get mental superpowers, but I do have an easier time mapping out ideas, as I don't have to rely so much on memory. Then faster typing means faster, easier ideation. Maybe I would journal more.
It's the whole waterfall-vs-agile on a micro scale.
The other thing that I sometimes end up doing with stenography is just a stream-of-consciousness-style writing where I then have to edit it down.
On the one hand, when I see something like this I think: Maybe this would be worth looking into to reduce chances of RSI.
On the other hand, when I look at videos of people typing like this, it strikes me as being ergonomically weird. Very low keyboards, hands locked into a relatively small area of space, etc.
I see the author is here. Would love to hear about this from an insider!
Disclosure: full-time programmer, working jazz drummer, amateur pianist who is always terrified that it's all gonna catch up with me one of these days.
It reminds me of Chinese characters. Sure, you could use latin characters to represent a word or phrase. OR you could write a tiny little pictogram that captures the same thing in a fraction of the time and space.
The only problem is that you now have to memorize thousands of unique symbols instead of just ~26. I imagine stenographers must go through a similar process and memorize the "shape" of thousands of words and phrases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classifica...
But I did get curious. I just tried to copy a few sentences from a UN document in both Simplified Chinese and English, and the time I spent are surprisingly similar. I imagine Traditional Chinese would be worse though.
edit: also, written Chinese has been traditionally thought of as the widespread adoption of a stenographic script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerical_script
These Perkins-style keyboards, which are also colloquially referred to as Braille keyboards, are often integrated into refreshable Braille displays (and are sometimes standalone devices that are known as Braille notetakers, which also allow one to utilize various Braille codes better), which is how one reads digital material. Not only can these keyboards (and chords) be used to type, they are used to navigate, via screen reader, mobile and physical computer terminals, along with other interfaces.
When it comes to typing out something in math code, for example, Braille users have the ultimate advantage over anyone who uses LaTeX/MathML, if they know which Braille code to learn. Right now, that Braille code is currently Lambda. They can type out, for example, infty, with a single Braille chord, if they know what they are doing. Such codes also allow for the spatial encoding of the integral sign and its components, in a linear manner, along with the back-translating of that into how it should be displayed visually to a sighted person.
But, if one learned Braille as an adult, they tend to prefer to at least keep a standard Bluetooth keyboard around to type in QWERTY/QWERTZ. They cannot help falling back on it from time to time.
The people who learned Braille in school as a young child tend to prefer Braille chords over standard keyboards, even for standard typing. It can help prevent typing errors too, so it is a very useful skill to have.
One can practice these chords on the vast majority of standard keyboards, including on laptops.
But, there are also a couple of Braille Bluetooth keyboards that are being sold, but they are typically overpriced for what they are.
My thoughts on going down to one-symbol-per-chord:
- Due to the small steno layout, you don't need to stretch your hands to far symbols on the keyboard. - You're not limited to what's on the keyboard. Symbols like ÷ and © and any emoji are now first-class citizens. - There are cases where you get multiple symbols per chord. For example, calling a function `()` is one chord. Writing an arrow like `=>` is also one chord.
Overall, I'd say that coding speed doesn't really change as typing fast is not what makes coding fast.
There are some real advantages that I find difficult to quantify, though. I switch between stenography and typing for both coding and writing depending on whether I'm at my desk and I find it hard to express clearly why coding in stenography feels natural and nice. I suppose: there's a certain fluidity when you break things down into semantic words rather than simply symbols.
Hope that helps!
When coding I seem to expend most of my keystrokes just moving around the page. I take it you just setup some short chords for each arrow key, pgup/pgdn, ctrl, alt... etc.
It is hard enough getting around a desktop with just keyboard shortcuts as it is!? I expect I would waste an inordinate amount of time fiddling with my dictionary trying to optimize keystrokes for the OS and apps that I spend the most time in.
If there where to be a heads up display as a reference, the learning curve would be cut down quite a lot.
Check out contact form if anyone is interested.
http://tbf-rnd.life/blog/2019/06/16/0-learning-curve-chorded... http://tbf-rnd.life/contact/
However, if I'm wrong I'd like to put in the effort to reach the final 5%, or even maybe switch to a different keyboard layout, or teach myself stenography.
Does anyone have any data or insight on touch typing/stenography and coding speed rather than typing speed?
Fast typing helps a smidge with the easiest problems on topcoder. Of course, that's after you commit to single character variable names.
I don’t need to think about what my fingers are doing, and I can focus on what I’m speaking or what I’m going to do/talk about next.
This reduces the frequency and duration of pauses, and makes the presentations more engaging. The goal is to be modifying text just a bit slower than people can keep up with, and taking explanatory pauses after dense changes.
Obviously helps if you can navigate your editor sans mouse.
For this system, You’d need an input device that sends its input to a dictionary and then sends that through the normal input?
Like another poster here, vim’s modal editing bit with chording makes me wonder what could be achieved with a normal keyboard
However, not all of them are "computer" or "realtime" compatible, which roughly means that you wouldn't be able to distinguish in your writing between homophones like "their" and "there" and "they're."
Here's a list of some of the languages that have been developed or ported to Plover: https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Chorded-Syst...
There is a Plover plugin to switch on-the-fly between different steno systems.
There is also a plugin to switch between enabled dictionaries on-the-fly.
Finally, there is the idea of bilingual dictionaries, but I haven't seen it implemented well yet.
There's also the problem of some languages having drastically different layouts.
So far, the most multilingual and successful stenographer I've seen is Stanley Sakai. Here's him writing in a Spanish theory that he developed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGZ43TID9jU&t=90s
I also know that there are bilingual stenographers in Canada who write both English and French, but I haven't seen it in action yet.
In summary, I think that multilingual stenography is critical for the adoption of steno, but it's currently not easily accessible or widely used.