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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

If it came across that way, I'm sorry - I'm genuinely curious why such machines don't convert what was typed into English. In the past it was almost certainly a lack of computational power (or zero) - what about now? I was only asking about the reading portion, the writing is pretty clearly faster.

I'm not in any claiming that they should be typing on QWERTY. I'm wondering why the pathological case exists at all when it seems it doesn't have to, and if there's a reason for it that I'm not aware of. Maybe there's a market for machines like this to spit out English, maybe there isn't, but I'm not in the field so I really don't know.

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Ah, I'm sorry, I actually gave the wrong impression. On the machine I own, you can choose whether or not to have it display English, or what you've actually written, or a split screen with English on one side and what you've actually written on the other.

Reading it in English isn't as ideal as you may think, though. I actually prefer reading the notes. The problem is that if you're writing at 225 words a minute, it can be very easy to accidentally leave off a letter, or add an extra letter to a stroke. The English might come up as come up as a completely different word, where as if you're reading what you've actually written, it can be a lot easier to see your mistake and read the correct word.

For example, let's use the word Dime again. If I'm going at 225 and I accidentally add an "R" to the word dime, it'll look like "DRAOEUPL". In English, this would read "Did there come a time", where as if I were looking at my notes, it would be obvious to me that I intended for that to be "dime". If you're reading back at court, you don't want to make mistakes like that.

Makes sense, and yeah, that kind of error is something that grammar checkers still fail miserably at. Thanks!

It's good to know that it has at least been done. There are so many places where technology lies untapped, I was half-expecting this to be one of them since it's such an old field (and with close ties to the government).

I'm half expecting them to replace this field entirely with speech to text technology in 50 years or so.

50 years or so? Kurzweil would have another heart attack if he read this ;)

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