Video Type 225 Words per Minute with a Stenographic Keyboard (Video) 109
Stenotype machines are usually most visible when court reporters are using them. They've been around since the 1800s, when their output was holes in paper tape. Today's versions are essentially chorded keyboards that act as computer input devices. (Douglas Engelbart famously showed off a chorded keyboard during his 1968 Mother of All Demos.) Today you have The Open Steno Project, and Stenosaurus is a member. And while Joshua's project may not have an actual website quite yet, it has an active blog. And the 225 WPM claim? Totally possible. The world record for English language stenography is 360 WPM. And you thought the Dvorak Keyboard was fast. Hah! (Alternate Video Link)
Timothy Lord: You have computing hardware here.
Joshua Lifton: Yep.
Tim: And these are stenographic keyboards.
Joshua: Yeah. So, these are prototype steno typing machines, they’re used for stenography. Stenography is over 100 years old. It was originally done on a keyboard. They looked pretty much the same layout, but a different physical form, and it had a roll of paper that would unroll as you typed and then later you would go back and look at the markings on the paper which were just dots and you would transcribe that to English language. So the goal of stenography is to do this transcription in real time, so as quickly as anybody could speak, the conservation between two lawyers or a medical examiner and somebody else could occur, somebody will be sitting there, a stenographer will be sitting there, transcribing it in real time, that’s the origin of stenography. And it really hasn’t changed that much. This same keyboard layout has persisted for over 100 years. The theory behind learning it and using it is essentially the same. They went digital about 30 or 40 years ago and really since then it hasn’t changed much at all. What we’re doing here is we’re bringing it into the modern age in a couple of different ways, first everything is being open sourced. Up until now everything has been closed sourced and quite expensive, so
Tim: What does expensive mean in this case?
Joshua: Expensive means for a machine you’re looking at a couple of thousand, maybe up to $4,000, $5,000 for the software which is required to make machine work on a computer, again another $2000, $4,000 and then there’s the cost of education, so actually learning how to use it and training yourself and whatnot can be many times more than that. So you’re looking at kind of a minimum $10,000 investment for a professional quality setup. The little price point necessitates a different physical setup, so this machine has physical key switches as opposed to levers that most steno machines have. It’s more like a piano almost, so that brings the cost down a little bit, but really there is just a lot of innovation that goes into this, that doesn’t exist yet in the modern stenography world. So for example you don’t need any software on your computer to use this, right, you can plug it in, your computer will recognize it as USB keyboard, and you just start typing, and this can happen on any computer. Right now there’s no other stenotype machine that can do that.
Tim: Since stenography generally means making phonetic output, how does this interpret that to make an intelligible bit string? If I type “jumped over the hill”
Joshua: Yeah, right, right, right. The foundation of stenography is phonetic. It’s phonetic mapping between what you are hearing and what you would chord out. The way that translation actually takes place, half of it’s in the human, you need to learn what that mapping is, right, what am I hearing and then how do my fingers move on the keyboard to make that phonetic representation and then from there you end up with what's called a chord and that chord is then translated according to software, in this case in the machine, and it’s a giant look-up table. There’s a large dictionary that translates this particular chord or set of chords into this arbitrary string, and that string can be a single letter, it could be a word, it could be phrase, it could be an entire book, right, it’s really totally up to you what that is. Now there are standards of course, and the standard dictionary will have all of the English language words, plus all the common phrases and then you would add to that and modify it as you grow with the stenographer and as you enter different domains, so you might for example have a different dictionary if you’re doing a court reporting case than when you’re actually in a college situation transcribing a professor’s notes for medical school, for example. And even then you might have different dictionaries for say, programming in Java versus programming in Python, right, and that’s something that’s really interesting about this, right now there are really only professional stenographers, then everyone else.
Tim: At that price?
Joshua: At that $10,000 price and that level of commitment, maybe great to type at 225 words a minute but I’d be happy with 120 also or even 100.
Tim:
Joshua: So there’s really not much in between and that’s I think where the biggest potential is, for people like me and you and folks watching this who probably spend a lot of time in front of computer to learn a faster and more efficient, more customizable way of typing, that is almost certainly less stressful on your body than a standard keyboard.
Tim: To be clear, you’re not a stenographer yourself?
Joshua: No. So I have programmed the software that runs these things. I know how to build them and build the circuitry. I’ve not put in the time yet to actually learn stenography. What I’m hoping though and from everything I can tell from other people watching other people learn is, I think that I can get to be a better typist, a faster typist, a more efficient typist and about the time it will take me to convert from a QWERTY keyboard to a Dvorak or Colemak keyboard, which I don’t know those either, but I’ve seen people learn them. So, a couple of months to really come up to speed, still a level I’d be very happy with.
Tim: Talk about the hardware you’ve got, that you are actually holding? Is this like laminated bamboo?
Joshua: This is not laminated, it’s – well, yeah, in the end, the manufacturer bamboo boards, yes they laminate them but there’s no coating on this other than wood finish. My collaborator Kurt Mottweiler built this first prototype. You will see it has an LCD display. It’s just going to be a 16 character by two-row display. It’s missing two keys here. This prototype here is the final physical layout and sizing of the keyboard, obviously the back plane is not the keyboard. We’re still lying out the electronics and what not but have some proofs of concept there. The keys are pretty straightforward. This entire top row is actually one key, logically, these two keys are one key, these two keys are one key, so that leaves – the rest of the keys are individual, this side of the keyboard, so where my left hand would rest does the initial set of consonants, my thumbs deal with the vowels and these four keys and my right hand deals with the final set of consonants, so to make a phonetic chord, I would just hear the sound and then translate into those initial consonant vowel, final consonant and go from there. So I could hear a word that I have never heard before, I don’t know how to spell it, I don’t know what it means, and still properly translate it here, so it kind of takes spelling out of the equation which is probably a bonus for a lot of people.
Tim: What were the final materials?
Joshua: The materials will be..
Tim: Pretty good representative?
Joshua: Yeah, this is very representative. So it will be bamboo case. The case will look a little bit different in size and dimension than this. These are machined aluminum keys that have been – these have been brushed, but I think the final will be blasted and then anodized. This is actually very representative of what the keys will look like in the end. There’s some blemishes here that won’t be on the final. These were handmade. The key switches – anybody familiar with the keyboard industry who probably recognizes this as a Cherry MX Red. This is what’s in our prototype, but what we are actually using and you can see that it has this crosshair fitting, that’s very difficult to manufacture for, and they’re in short supply, so we are actually going with a company called Matias out of Canada and this is a different sort of key switch. And Matias has been great to work with. They are making a special key switch just for us and we are buying a whole bunch of them, what’s called a quiet linear switch, meaning that there’s no tactile bump in there and it’s completely quiet, which is what most stenographers look like. We will also have the option for some tactile feedback and if you really want the loud clicky, we will get that to you too. That will be one of the options.
Tim: How big is the market for stenography keyboards?
Joshua: It’s small. So the market for stenography, currently there are about 30,000 professional stenographers. We’ll soon reach a lot of them, I think. What we are really hoping is to broaden the market to anybody that uses a computer in large quantity time chunks. So I’m certainly in that market, you’re probably in that market, the real trick though is teaching people how to use it. It’s a good time commitment. To that end we’re partnering with one of the biggest online educators in this field in stenography, the owner of that company is really excited about the projects. I need to reconnect with him soon to talk to him about details, but he’s already onboard with helping us out and hopefully that takes the form of some educational material.
Now this is funny. (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry I worked for a company that built Stenomachines and wrote software for Court Reporters.
1. Learning to write Steno is hard. It is very hard. A lot of full time students never break 180, 225 is what you need to graduate.
2. The market is small.
3. You have several companies that have been in the market for decades. Stenograph, Advantage Software, ProCat, and Stenovations are probably the market leaders.
4. The requirement for support is super high.
5. The market is shrinking.
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Re:Now this is funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that they'd have to put in a LOT of hours training on those systems to get that increase.
And for most of them, the majority of time is spent thinking about what to type.
And... (Score:2)
Most people speak at under 150 wpm, anyway, and...
The future here is not using your hands, but is 100% in the speech-to-text area. My phone does a pretty amazing job today, all things considered. Just the tip of the iceberg.
What would you prefer -- a funky keyboard and reams of training, or a tiny microphone and no training?
Seriously, the future of computer interfacing lies in Speech-to-Text, in-eye displays, and something ranging from an earphone to a bone conduction implant. And that's just until they tie
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You'll also have a lot of us dinosaurs who think 80 wpm is good enough for any coder. We tend to have a very narrow world view in that we know where we want the curly braces, we want our tabs to be the right distances, we line things up, etc. We simply don't know how anyone could write readable code with a "word-oriented" keyboard like that. How does it do camelCase? How do you put in dot operators without it starting a new sentence? And how's it all going to look - is the software going to grind all yo
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I honestly don't think I can break 80wpm. My bottleneck in programming is not how fast I can type, or how efficient my vim-fu, but how fast I can think, and how fast I can mentally develop the solution (reading documentation, drawing conclusions, and finally writing as little code as I possibly can).
Re: Now this is funny. (Score:2)
Personally, I type faster than I speak and think faster than I can type. Much, much faster. I was forced to take touch typing in high school as a prerequisite for computer courses and despite being insulted at having to take a class I considered "secretary work" at the time, I now see it as the most useful course I ever took.
10 lines of code... dear God are you literally retarded? When I'm in the implantation phase I churn out literally thousands of lines of code in a day. You have to be making this up.
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He's probably spending most of his day on /. I agree. If I'm in the implementation phase, I can churn out hundreds of lines of code in a day.
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And people wonder why there's so much insecure code out in the wild...
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If you're implying that I write insecure code because I write a lot of code then you're mistaken. I produce a lot of code because I'm able to utilize technology to generate clean, bug free code for very common scenarios. I also write a lot of quality unit tests. On top of that, my code contains quality documentation. You just can't write disciplined code like that and not produce many lines of code.
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It would never work for programmers or secretaries. Both groups rely heavily on punctuation, symbols, and formatting.
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It would never work for programmers or secretaries. Both groups rely heavily on punctuation, symbols, and formatting.
I'm guessing you've never taken a test where error-free wpm is a requirement, if you did then you'd know that punctuation, symbols, and formatting exactly are required in order to either get hired, or pass as a pre-screening requirement. The last one I did(about 5 years ago) required 118wpm error free, with perfect duplication of formatting. I've seen them hit as high as 125 on your qwerty keyboard, and 145 for dvorak.
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The thing is - while it's "neat" to write 150wpm, is it practical for all the effort you need to put in
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To start with, Stenography isn't realistic for the average person who wants to increase their typing speed (ie: secretaries, journalists, writers, and especially not coders). I can't even express how hard it is to reach 225 words per minute. The goal is to have a student get to that point in 2 years
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many courtrooms do not allow recording or electronic devices. thus, the courtroom sketches and transcribing of proceedings in realtime.
Except the court reporter is generally exempt from such rules. I used to be one. Most of the time the record is keyed real time. However you can't always get it all and be 100% every time. The recording is used to clean up the transcription after the fact.
The ban of recording devices is for the general public and reporters.
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many courtrooms do not allow recording or electronic devices. thus, the courtroom sketches and transcribing of proceedings in realtime.
Last time I was in federal court in New York City, (a while ago), they let people take notes on laptops.
I was wondering whether by now they've given up on trying to ban smartphones too, like the museums did (for photos).
If you're sitting there with an iPhone or laptop, it's impossible for the court officers to know whether you're secretly recording the proceedings.
I suppose lawyers could be barred from doing it, because they wouldn't risk a judge's sanction or the possibility of getting disbarred.
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You really want to have juries looking back at statements and thinking, "Damn you Auto-Correct!"
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If it is as good as the software used for closed captioning the news, then sure why not? I mean, I am still trying to figure out what "republican nests" are and what they have to do with the story about Robin Williams but, hey....if its good enough for the deaf its good enough for kart right?
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Is the closed-captioned news created by software, or do they still have stenographers doing it?
In my understanding, transcription software like Dragon is acceptable for many purposes if it's trained on one voice, but it can't transcribe voices that it's not trained on. And Google messages is not too accurate and takes an enormous amount of cloud processing.
Is that still true? Or am I out of date?
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Oh its terrible. If the sound is on so I can hear the story, its generally a good laugh. If the sound is off (like at the coffee shop I stop at on my way to work most days) then its maybe 2 out of 3 stories where I can even tell what they are talking about from CC text alone. It must be infuriating to try and watch the news for an actual deaf person.
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Re:Now this is funny. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a writer, but i imagine that's similar. Is anyone really being held back from writing the next great american novel because they only type at 90 wpm? Or is it just that they don't really have a good idea.
Re:Now this is funny. (Score:4, Funny)
Quite a few writers do 'stream-of-consciousness' writing and then go back and edit it... If we're lucky. :p
But even them I doubt really are planning to go to school to learn stenography.
More than that though, my typing speed isn't a bottleneck. The bottleneck is envisioning the idea and subsequently debugging the resulting code.
Sounds about right.
Is anyone really being held back from writing the next great american novel because they only type at 90 wpm?
Doubtful, these modern hipster authors are bragging that they pecked it out on a smartphone keyboard; and we're lucky if we don't have to read it in typical texting shorthand.
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Nowhere in the entire thing does she mention typing speed, at least not that I remember.
Re:Now this is funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
Typing a lot of wpm isn't the problem. It's picking the *right* words that slows you down.
Now this is funny. (Score:1)
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If you get a list of the 30 or 100 most frequent words, and make unique 1- and 2-letter abbreviations for each one, you can type pretty damn fast. It get a little complicated to figure out unique abbreviations (do I use "t" for "to" or "the"?). It also gets complicated to figure out prefixes and suffixes (do I use "g" for "go" or for "ing"?).
You can even put them into auto-correct.
There was a company that wrote a small shorthand program for the qwerty keyboard. It was basically a text expansion program for
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True. You sound like you know what you're talking about.
But as BitterOak said, there are other applications. I go to medical conferences. I take notes and write reports. Very often, I record a 1-hour lecture and transcribe the whole thing. I've always dreamed about having a cheap stenography machine, which would give me a rough transcript right there, either from a qwerty keyboard or from a stenotype keyboard, like the stenographers I see at court hearings. I type 70wpm, and 180wpm would be all I need. If i
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I dunno. I looked over the Wikipedia page for Stenotype and I didn't see anything that looked that difficult. It's a new keyboard with chorded keys, like the piano. I'd have to learn a big new vocabulary, but the abbreviations have a system. I never had any way to try it out without investing a couple of thousand dollars.
It seems as if you could create a stenotype keyboard on a tablet. I wonder if the Raven works on a tablet.
I learned Gregg shorthand without too much trouble, with probably 50 hours of appli
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Many moons ago I was in a steno school and can confirm that even a basic level of proficiency is a lot of work. It takes a lot of practice to get used to things like having the same letter on both sides of the keyboard (unmarked!), missing letters, umpteen rules for how to break up words and all the special patterns for common words and word endings. Often you have to press two keys with the same finger. I remember there was a concert pianist enrolled at the school that was on the fast track, but for norma
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Sorry I worked for a company that built Stenomachines and wrote software for Court Reporters. 1. Learning to write Steno is hard. It is very hard. A lot of full time students never break 180, 225 is what you need to graduate.
I've often wondered how fast I could type with a steno machine. When I was in college I used to do transcription for a law firm. I can burst up to 250WPM on a QWERTY keyboard and average about 170WPM. I would do full speed transcriptions for that law firm and got through a 6 month backlog of tapes in a couple of weeks. But I imagine that switching to the steno machine would be such a huge pain in the ass for me that I would completely lose my mind and give up and switch right back to the QWERTY keyboard
Plover (Score:4, Informative)
No discussion of open source steno is complete without mentioning the excellent Plover program. If you're interested at all in steno, check it out:
http://plover.stenoknight.com/
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Damn. I'm just interested in plovers [slashdot.org].
The new and improved buggy whip (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sorry for being negative here, but listening to how stenography is "about to evolve" makes me laugh. In this day and age where every damn thing is captured on video and audio already, questioning the validity of a stenographer and the specialized equipment they require to do the exact same job isn't exactly an exercise in futility.
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Seems to me that there's a whole new market there. Court stenography is less and less important, but there's a lot of new opportunities for transcription. Much of that video should be captioned or transcribed. There's a considerable market in having your video/audio transcribed so that it's searchable, or pasteable into your document, or whatnot.
I don't know how long that market will be open, since it's at least conceptually automatable, but for the moment the automated tools leave a lot to be desired. (I s
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I would expect that wrist pain is more of a posture problem. I was reading up on Steno stuff recently and most of them have appeared to be pretty by for ergonomics in my opinion. That doesn't mean though that it couldn't be implemented in a much better way. I prefer to type with my forearms and elbows resting on the table surface with my wrists and hands being levered up to level with the keyboard. Most of the Steno machines I've seen appeared to be much to tall for this to work. But as one of the stenosaur
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All broadcast TV in North America must be captioned. Pre-recorded shows can be captioned in advance. Anything live, news, sports, award shows, current events shows etc are all captioned live and in real-time using steno. While you are watching the show, someone with a steno machine is watching the same broadcast and transcribing it live. The steno goes to a computer that translates it to English, and then by modem or vpn to the studio's caption encoder and on to the tv. A small but thriving industry.
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hum (Score:3)
Couldn't you just take any keyboard and write macros using http://www.autohotkey.com/ [autohotkey.com] and do the same thing? :-)
Neither of his demo units are functional?
He has no idea how to even use the thing he's invented?!?!
I don't think I'll be investing any time soon.
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He has no idea how to even use the thing he's invented?!?!
To be fair, the engineers behind the x-1 had chuck yeager use the thing they invented. I'm not sure how many could actually fly a plane.
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He has no idea how to even use the thing he's invented?!?!
To be fair, the engineers behind the x-1 had chuck yeager use the thing they invented. I'm not sure how many could actually fly a plane.
But there were at least pilots involved in the design process, and at the presentation to the airforce. They didn't sit in a booth, wave at the jet and say "Well, I have no idea how to fly... and that one there is missing a wing... but I've seen a bird before... anyway, you guys have pilots right? Like lots of them?"
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Stenography for CODING? LOL! (Score:4, Insightful)
Take a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for stenotype [wikipedia.org] to see why using a stenographic keyboard for coding is such a laughable idea.
Stenography relies heavily on a highly-trained stenographer to do the recording, and on a similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English. Trying to use that for writing code, where you don't have the redundancy and patterns of English, is a bit like trying to use Swype to transcribe telephone numbers. Wrong tool for the task, period.
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Ta-da! [youtube.com]
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I wonder why parent was modded as +4 insightful? (Score:2)
Stenography relies heavily on a highly-trained stenographer to do the recording, and on a similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English. Trying to use that for writing code, where you don't have the redundancy and patterns of English, is a bit like trying to use Swype to transcribe telephone numbers. Wrong tool for the task, period.
I wonder why parent was modded as +4 insightful? There is no need for "similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recogniza
i thought it said "steganography" (Score:1)
and i was thinking "how the hell can you type steganographically even faster than normal?
Time for a Race (Score:3)
Race Qwerty vs Dvorak vs Steno at Type Racer [typeracer.com].
Clearly some people type much faster than a measly 120 WPM (as TFA [openstenoproject.org] indicated) using a qwerty layout.
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Programming (Score:1)
&^*308cbpBO)780i76D$^*.//.we0-fw (Score:1)
q898(^*$*EUIDXEZ{Pm;vd80eGUIOIO:>P{
{}.
det6767ir6768P)I*)&%B(()_}K>?YIBV$WCJ!!!!!
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Please check your medication.
I one tried a 'Hello World' program in 225 wpm (Score:2)
It worked, but came out as 'hell it suks', whereupon I got a fit and almost choked,
and a subsequent effort at 10 wpm was spent to correct the typos. At that time I felt
a dunce, and I had a program that didn't do much of anything surprising anymore.
Morse code (Score:3)
I'm working on a machine to bring Morse code into the digital age. Please back my kickstarter campaign.
Thank you.
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I can do 150 wpd on my tablet.
As long as I have a sharp chisel.
Misread as steganographic keyboard (Score:1)
Lecture notes (Score:1)
I think we can all relax about the throwaway example he tossed out there about coding with steganography. We can all see how it's a bad idea, so the 20 people who've made that same point now can rest assured that their unique insight is appreciated.
I would've loved to be able to do ~180 wpm when taking notes in university. For me, notes will always be far better than a recording because they're much easier to skim than video. Also the act of noting increases retention, and you can choose what is worth writi
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Whoops! steganography -> stenography
[Destination] in summary links (Score:1)
Yes, I could've checked the status bar first, but then you could say that about comment links.