
Stenotype - tosh
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
======
jp3
Stenotype's current role as eccentric curio is largely due to its unattractive
onboarding time costs. Even though stenotype is objectively the speediest
keyed input system afaik for English, there's a steep learning curve, the
initial stages of which will find you unable to type much of anything at all
for the first few months of use, vs almost instant, if plodding, output on
standard QWERTY.

If you had initially learned Stenotype rather than touchtyping when young,
it's likely that your WPM would be 160WPM minimum, a tad shy of a 'court-
ready' stenographer. I'd guess most programmers can probably average 110WPM
steady-state. Online typing tests using short paragraphs tend to overestimate
your real 9-5 typing speed by nearly 30% because you push yourself into
"bursts" for the 2-3 sentence test.

Barring 99% accurate NLP dictation, how much text do you think your lifetime
output will be? Or even if dictation is viable, how hoarse can you stand to be
from vocal overuse? Viewed this way, stenotype's typical gain of over 50%
output to typing speeds is likely worth the initial time investment when
leveraged across the lifetime of anyone whose primary instrument of work is a
computer. But oof, the buffering period is shite.

And as a more qualitative assessment: I have heard there is a very special joy
as your stenotype speeds crest 200WPM, because you begin to be able to "think
onto the page" (there's probably a German word for this idea). You merely
think, your hands move, and your thoughts appear onscreen.

A friend who is more laconic than I put it: "Pen and paper; dial-up.
Touchtyping; cable modem. Stenotype; fiber."

(Disclaimer: I am in the midst of learning stenotype personally, and can
confirm that it is kludgy and irritating but quickly yields impressive speeds.
Mainly type Dvorak, burst speeds up to 165WPM, multi-hour steady-state of
125WPM. All generalized numbers above are very gooey, in the sense that they
are educated spitball estimates, heavy on the spit)

~~~
taneq
> I'd guess most programmers can probably average 110WPM steady-state.

On QWERTY? I don't think I've ever met anyone who could reliably top 90 in a
timed transcription test, and tbh programmers are seldom at the top of that.
We spend way more time thinking than typing and when data entry speed is an
issue we build faster tools. Maybe I've just not worked with any super-gurus
though.

~~~
jp3
All my evidence is anecdotal (though confirmed with quantitative testing) but
my sense of the "average user" is college friends of mine who do not program,
and a broad selection of people seem to be able to hit 80-90WPM on the short
tests.

It used to be a that a "professional typist" was requested to hit 75WPM, and
search engines still return that datum despite being a laughable number in the
field now.

I do not think any of my programming friends/colleagues type slower than
100WPM, and many can burst between 130-150WPM. Though based on your
appellation of "super-gurus," there are definitely a few who fit that
category, so selection bias could well be tugging my perceived average
northwards.

~~~
cjbprime
I'm one of the 130-150WPM qwerty burst programmer typists, but a quick round
of Typeracer at work showed that none of my programmer coworkers at the time
were near to hitting 100WPM, so I expect you're overestimating the average
speed.

Also, Typeracer itself claims my 133WPM average is around the 99.99th
percentile speed for registered Typeracer users. That's surprisingly high too.

------
andai
Here's a demo of programming Python with Plover (mentioned in thread)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRFKZGWrmrM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRFKZGWrmrM)

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pmoriarty
A lot of steno's vaunted speed comes from very heavy use of macros.

The same could be done on a standard QWERTY keyboard, in any half-decent
editor that supports macros.

If you can hit one single key in your editor and have it spew out 10 words of
a commonly used phrase or sentence in a second, and what you're transcribing
consists of a lot of such common words or phrases (like depositions in court),
now you're magically typing roughly 600 words per minute.

Memorizing all the key combinations that trigger macros is one major reason
why learning steno takes so long.

~~~
leoc
> A lot of steno's vaunted speed comes from very heavy use of macros.

It's more than that: classic steno's not at all about saving operator time and
labour or generating a final text quickly, and in fact it sacrificed both of
those goods in pursuit of its actual goal of being able to transcribe speech
in real time. The operator bashes out a crabbed and idiosyncratic shorthand in
real time, then he or she traditionally had to rework that into a fair copy
later. Computerisation has apparently made steno with automatic, real-time
reworking a reality, but if you want a system for people who do their own text
input and want final results immediately (especially for text-based
interaction like a command line) steno is still not the obvious place to start
from. Velotype/Veyboard
[https://www.velotype.com/en/](https://www.velotype.com/en/) /
[http://www.veyboard.nl/en_main.html](http://www.veyboard.nl/en_main.html)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velotype)
seems like a better starting point: another fast two-handed chording system,
but probably more "honest" and more suitable for interactive input.

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ThinkingGuy
The article focuses on stenotype usage in the US. Can anyone here chime in on
how the problem of quickly transcribing spoken words is handled in other
countries and other languages? Or is the arrangement of keys on a steno
machine not necessarily biased toward a particular language?

~~~
detaro
German stenotype works quite similarly from what I know, although with a
different keyboard layout. For a long time Stenografie (shorthand writing with
a pen) was important (not sure how important it was in the US), and is still
used e.g. for creating parliamentary records, where other countries have
switched to stenotype.

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a3n
> there's a steep learning curve, the initial stages of which will find you
> unable to type much of anything at all for the first few months of use, vs
> almost instant, if plodding, output on standard QWERTY.

That's because most of us have spent a lifetime onboarding QWERTY.

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choeger
Yet another profession that will be more or less extinct in about a decade or
two.

Nevertheless an intriguing method to have humans trained in what essentially
is a mechanic task. Reminds me of Dune.

~~~
jp3
It's already an husked iteration of what the field was ten years ago. And
within the last 2-3yrs, the business of transcription has headed towards SaaS-
like providers with fairly dismal compensation structures.

re: "extinct in a decade or two," time horizons look more like 5-7 years
maximum, though that has more to do with structural labor changes and machine-
assisted processing; can't even consider an NLP breakthrough in the equation.

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saagarjha
Do the WPM figures at to top account for accurate transcription, or the
shorthand that stenographers use?

~~~
jp3
In modern practice, the shorthand is more or less instantly compiled. Using a
desktop application like Plover, you will only ever see the actual word you
meant to type.

But yes, the old analog ticker-tape output would have been the shorthand.

