[HN Gopher] Open Steno Project - Freeing stenography
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Open Steno Project - Freeing stenography
Author : pabs3
Score : 251 points
Date : 2021-10-29 05:59 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openstenoproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openstenoproject.org)
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I got into this a few years ago and it was really fun! Highly
| recommended just for the experience itself.
| telesilla wrote:
| I've been holding off writing long form because of the strain
| of typing and was looking into dictation but my brain forms
| better structures better when I write. Have you noticed
| improved physical performance with steno? I also wonder if it
| might be easy to pick up, as a pianist.
| comma_at wrote:
| Learning a steno system is similar to learning a new spoken
| language - it takes time, and the time it takes differs based
| on the time you invest daily, personal experience, type of
| study... Some have reached 100wpm in 2 months, some take 2
| years. As a reference number - to be a certified stenographer
| you need to pass a test with at least 225wpm with 99%
| precision. The classes take 2 years, I think.
|
| Being a pianist might be handy, but you'll still need to
| practice a lot to see progress.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I'm new to steno. This article in their wiki is great:
| https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Stenography-...
|
| It's essentially a chord-based, dictionary-based, short-hand
| typing. You write by looking up entries in a custom dictionary (a
| dictionary of syllables for example) by pressing combinations of
| keys. The stenographer's keyboard has few keys, compared to a
| QWERTY. You can define your dictionary however you like.
|
| This must be extremely good for languages whose phonetics can be
| directly translated to its ortographics (without semantic or
| grammatical parsing), because then the dictionary is small and
| easy to remember. English is not optimal in that sense: e.g. the
| words 'flower' and 'flour' are phonetically identical. Edit: but
| then, ML transcription would work great for those languages for
| the same reason.
|
| You could supplement with ML or some crafty NLP to effectively
| simplify dictionaries. Autocomplete/autocorrect in other words.
| Really cool domain.
| dharmab wrote:
| I knew a court reporter. She would clean up the shorthand
| afterwards from her memory and using the audio recordings if
| needed. Her steno had a full alphabet mode for typing things
| that needed accuracy like people's names.
| jhgb wrote:
| > I'm new to steno. This article in their wiki is great:
| https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Stenography-...
|
| I don't get why that page doesn't call it stenotypy (as in, on
| a machine) instead of stenography (as in Pitman, Gregg,
| Teeline, etc.).
|
| Also, I take it that "CAT software" does not refer to computer-
| aided translation here?
| CrazyStat wrote:
| > Also, I take it that "CAT software" does not refer to
| computer-aided translation here?
|
| Transcription instead of translation.
| woodrowbarlow wrote:
| the video on the landing page makes this claim:
|
| > steno is not typing. typing is when you get one character
| of output per one press of the keyboard; whereas in steno you
| press multiple keys at once to make a steno outline which
| must then go through a translation process to produce
| readable text. this is why court reporters call the process
| writing and not typing.
| jhgb wrote:
| Ehm... https://www.britannica.com/topic/stenotypy
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I am guessing it's because stenographers originally did it by
| writing shorthand, and nobody wanted to change the name of
| their job just because started using a different tool to do
| it.
| xupybd wrote:
| I really need to try this. I hear it'll work on the ergo dox too.
| bsanr wrote:
| More than anything, I'd like a one-handed steno scheme to become
| available. It would be a game-changer for wearable and XR input.
|
| Unfortunately, I think English language input will always be at a
| disadvantage compared to those that use ideograms. Steno-ing
| radicals would be ideal; one stroke per "word" without having to
| worry about pronunciation.
|
| Swype-style input is actually quite fast, but the necessity of
| looking directly at the keyboard to ensure any measure of
| accuracy is limiting. I wonder if force feedback to help users
| know where on the keyboard their finger currently is, as well as
| improved input of punctuation, might bring it up to steno's speed
| (which would be revelatory in a world where a huge portion of
| text input is done on mobile devices).
| xkfm wrote:
| This is fun to play around with. But, I really dislike the
| constant dictionary modification (per person) and different
| schools of theories. You end up having to toggle plover on and
| off every time you have to type a word that's not in your
| dictionary (and decide to add it or not, according to your theory
| so you remember how to type it). This is going to happen to you
| very frequently depending on the context you're typing in. It's
| why court reporters spend time before and after court modifying
| their dictionary and cleaning up their dictations.
|
| Also, depending on where you learned English, you're going to
| have a lot of "is that word really pronounced like that"
| situations when you go to type a word the first few times.
|
| To sum up my frustrations, want to type about 'foo' detailed
| subject? You're going to have to spend time adding words to your
| dictionary, or toggle plover off to type faster. Basically, you
| can type about 97% of a sentence using Plover, but you'll have to
| turn it off or slow down a lot to type that last 3%.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I've not used the tech, but maybe you could reduce some
| languages to something lower-level than words, but higher-level
| than letters. Like syllables. A dictionary of syllables might
| not be useful, if it's a 2-3 letter syllable that's looked-up
| via a 2 key chord. Dunno, that might be too simple. But I'd say
| there's a lot of space here for something better than regular
| stenography or QWERTY.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| Much of what steno dictionaries do is just that. Here's
| plover's default main.json dictionary [0].
|
| The ^ character in entries works like glue. So entries that
| end with ^ attach to the next thing you write, and entries
| that start with ^ attach to the previous thing you wrote.
|
| [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openstenoproject/plover
| /ma...
| DavidVoid wrote:
| You don't necessarily need to toggle plover off to write words
| that aren't in your dictionary. You can just fingerspell them
| [0]. (although that's generally not as fast as typing them with
| qwerty).
|
| It's been a little while since I last touched steno now, but I
| don't remember running into too many words that both weren't
| already in the default plover dictionary and weren't possible
| to easily construct with existing words.
|
| [0] https://www.artofchording.com/sounds/fingerspelling.html
| mkl wrote:
| Some of the previous threads:
|
| 4 months ago, 124 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27602077
|
| 2 years ago, 72 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21473098
|
| 5 years ago, 36 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12771576
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Steno shows up around here every now and then and it makes me
| more curious to try it every time it pops up. Does anyone here
| have experience with using steno in a bilingual context?
|
| I understand that chords are mapped to words through a dictionary
| of sorts, usually based on how the words are pronounced, but I
| expect different dictionaries to clash. I suppose it's possible
| to manually remap the entire dictionary for conflicting words,
| but that's a lot of work.
|
| Is there an easy way to switch dictionaries/languages? Has anyone
| tried this?
| marttt wrote:
| This topic has been occasionally raised in the Plover
| stenography Google group [1], I highly recommend browsing the
| threads there. I used to read this group, and I think there has
| been several proposals for e.g. orthographic steno systems.
|
| Years ago I made a quarter-assed, dreamy effort to implement
| the Gregg [2] shorthand system in my language (Estonian) -- I
| worked as a journalist back then, so it was supposed to serve a
| professional need -- but unfortunately this enthusiasm faded
| quickly.
|
| I remember how inspired I felt after reading a particular
| article about Gregg [3] for the first time, though.
|
| 1: https://groups.google.com/g/ploversteno
|
| 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_shorthand
|
| 3:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/yeah-...
| ArchieMaclean wrote:
| I haven't tried it, but there is a list of available
| dictionaries in Plover format [1] including French, Spanish and
| Italian.
|
| As to switching on the fly, I can't see anything in the docs
| about it - this extension might work? [2]
|
| [1] https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/List-of-
| Avai...
|
| [2] https://github.com/nsmarkop/plover_system_switcher
| comma_at wrote:
| Switching dictionaries/systems is possible and used every day
| by people who use it with more than 1 language. Think of it as
| switching to colemak or dvorak on your keyboard.
| jore wrote:
| can stenography be used to write code? or is it only for text
| based on speech?
| _flux wrote:
| It can. Here's an example of using Plover (now part of the
| openstenography project it seems):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=711T2simRyI
|
| (I know this is not the only presentation in the existence but
| it's one that I found; there's one by the author of Plover
| within some longer presentation about it.)
|
| Honestly, doesn't seem super fast to me :-).
| jore wrote:
| thanks, it also does not look fast to me and does not seem to
| improve the process the way it does for speech. Additionally
| I guess there is a steep learning curve so it is definitely
| not for everybody
| keyle wrote:
| The thing about code though is that it is succinct by
| design and a lot of thinking goes into writing 3 lines of
| code that will work coherently.
|
| So with typing keywords fast and efficient auto-completion,
| I doubt Steno would somehow make you a faster developer.
|
| Clarity and correctness rules over speed here.
| kremlin wrote:
| considering typing time isn't even close to the most time
| consuming part of programming, I don't think this will be
| relevant to programmers apart from the programmers who want
| to do it for fun
| comma_at wrote:
| https://danluu.com/productivity-velocity/
|
| Docstrings, writing documentation, talking to colleagues
| on Slack, asking questions on stackoverflow, writing
| mails, browsing, working in the terminal. We spend a lot
| of time writing. How much time could one save by e.g.
| doubling the speed?
|
| Another aspect is of the working memory - will it free
| your brain's resources? Will allow writing at the speed
| of thought allow for new/more thoughts?
|
| I think we should explore these waters, and steno is a
| solid choice.
| _flux wrote:
| I don't believe that is true.
|
| While nobody can deny the fact that most of the time in
| programming indeed is not spent writing, how about this:
| you type slower than you can think.
|
| So, when you get an idea, it's nice to be able to
| transfer the idea to the source code, so you can then
| move on the next idea or next part of the same one. You
| don't want to be held back by an inferior input method or
| a language with a lot of ceremonial about doing simple
| stuff. This happens in short bursts, even if the total
| time is quite short.
|
| Sometime it happens so that one thinks faster than one
| can speak. This usually leads you to get mixed up in
| words.
|
| A fast way to enter ideas is an important part of
| developing ergnomics.
| charcircuit wrote:
| It's not practical due to coding requiring special symbols,
| camelCase, and you tend to not write code just going forward.
|
| Steno is good for transcription or taking notes, but it's not
| great at other things.
| ArchieMaclean wrote:
| CamelCase is built in to Plover! [1] symbols work too - they
| might have less intuitive memorisation, but you don't use
| that many anyway (unless you're in APL...but that doesn't
| work with normal keyboards either).
|
| You can set up Vim-like navigation e.t.c. too (e.g. [2]), for
| moving about in code. I haven't tried it.
|
| I think however that the benefits of coding with Plover
| aren't really great enough to justify the huge struggle it
| would be to get proficient with it.
|
| [1] https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Dictionar
| y-F...
|
| [2] http://www.openstenoproject.org/stenodict/dictionaries/vi
| m_d...
| charcircuit wrote:
| Switching modes requires an extra chord. Movement in your
| editor now takes chords with a bunch of keys instead of 2.
| Steno is really flexible, but when you try to shoehorn it
| into situations where it's not good at the average chords
| per character typed.
| comma_at wrote:
| To balance the views, Mirabai, the person who started this
| project, does live transcription in vim and uses it for
| editing the notes as well. Ted, one of the lead developers,
| uses steno daily for programming. Emily, another user and
| plugin developer, has developed dictionaries to help with
| symbolic input and modifiers (e.g. ctrl+shift+x). There are
| plugins for changing case (camel, lower, snake etc.)
| charcircuit wrote:
| I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's just not worth
| learning steno if you mainly do programming. It will be
| complicated, require complicated chords, require you to
| constantly add new words and remember what you saved them
| as, simple chords (short cuts) like C^n turn into
| complicated ones. It's just not that optimized for
| programming.
| laumars wrote:
| In addition to that, I'd wager few people have long bouts of
| thinking code faster than they can type it. The act of typing
| is usually the easiest part of the whole process.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Stenography is inherently language-dependent, and most existing
| steno "theories" (i.e. input systems) are tailored towards
| natural-language text; hence one would have to design a special
| "theory" for each programming language, and provide custom
| steno chords (or chord sequences) for each identifier within
| any given project. So it would involve a lot of work, but the
| benefit could also be significant since steno seems to be a lot
| less RSI-prone than traditional keyboard typing.
| foobarbaz33 wrote:
| Usually the "busy work" of repeated idioms in code are best
| handled by snippets. Most IDEs, Emacs, and Vim have really
| advanced support for snippet expansion.
|
| The actual custom typing in code is pretty small in comparison.
| A few var names that auto complete assists with anyway.
|
| I'm sure there is some gains to be had with using steno on
| code. But I'd bet there's less a return on code than with
| English prose.
| noduerme wrote:
| I was always curious about this. My dad was a lawyer. I basically
| learned to touch type by transcribing legal dictations. From
| about 11 years old I used to earn my allowance by typing up
| depositions that had been recorded in his office. My mom had an
| electric typewriter and a tape machine with a foot pedal
| attachment that let you play or rewind the tape with your right
| foot. They'd pay me $2 an hour to sit and type them out.
| Formatting was important. For me it was like a game. I was always
| slightly jealous of the people who could use those court reporter
| machines, and wondered how they did it. Seemed like magic.
| anyfactor wrote:
| That is exactly what want do with my future children and
| brothers' children! Get them started earning money early by
| having them do something worthwhile.
|
| But how was your experience? How did your parents manage to
| have you work for them? Did your siblings worked for parents
| too?
| prionassembly wrote:
| Ever come across something unsavory in those depositions?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Short answer: Yes.
|
| Medium answer: The whole point of many depositions is to dig
| up unsavory information.
|
| Long answer: Divulging information from depositions that
| haven't been placed into the public record is a serious
| breach of ethics, and may get someone into legal hot water.
| Even asking is considered pretty uncool.
| prionassembly wrote:
| I understand the negative reactions now.
|
| I was not really interested in the confidential content of
| depositions, but rather on whether they were inadequate for
| a child/teen to be transcribing. Boolean-valued question.
| fnord77 wrote:
| > Stenographers stroke chords instead of typing keys, resulting
| in less movement and better ergonomics than typing.
|
| over the years I've seen various chord-style keyboard schemes.
| I've wondered why none have caught on - seems more logical than
| hitting individual keys.
| bsanr wrote:
| Cheap keyboards can't "do" steno. They're unable to register
| simultaneous keystrokes.
| bsdubernerd wrote:
| For starters, chording requires significantly more hand
| coordination than a normal keyboard. This is a _significant_
| show-stopper for many.
|
| Think about all the people you know that still have to look at
| the keyboard to type, that type just using one finger and one
| hand at a time, that still hunt for common symbols. None of
| this would work with a chording keyboard.
|
| Unless you're transcribing, typing is not usually a limiting
| factor. This is especially true for programmers. For example
| I'm using three different keyboard layouts due to the
| commonality of languages around here and as a result I keep
| doing typos due to switching. I never bothered on improving
| because it's simply not a limiting factor.
|
| What's even more ironic to me, is that we would have much
| simpler improvements to keyboards to make RSI and typing more
| efficient with minimal impact (I'm thinking ortholinear layouts
| - not chording!), but nobody really seems to care.
| willhinsa wrote:
| What is an ortholinear layout?
| mkl wrote:
| These: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ortholinear&atb=v279-1__&i
| ax=image...
|
| The keys are arranged in an orthogonal grid, instead of
| each row being offset from the ones it's next to.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I suppose the same reason why qwerty still reigns supreme
| despite being a purposefully inefficient layout, people know
| it.
|
| On a similar note I was talking to someone recently about touch
| screen phone keyboards, and how compressing a qwerty keyboard
| onto a (relative to the size of actual keyboards) tiny screen
| with very little haptic feedback seemed like an awful idea that
| was used early on because it was easy to understand and since
| then we've just kind of stuck with for no reason. The person I
| was talking to agreed, and we were thinking of ideas of how it
| could be improved. Later I was talking to a my two brothers
| about it, who are more a bit more normal, and neither of them
| thought it was worth the effort at all (and they're probably
| right), and thought it was pretty daft thing to care about.
|
| Long story short, if it aint broke, don't fix it I suppose
| t-3 wrote:
| I was very pleasantly surprised to find that my muscle memory
| for "real" QWERTY keyboards works on touch keyboards as well.
| I know people who can "touch type" (as in, without looking)
| on touchscreens as well. I doubt anyone would be able to
| become so adept if the layouts were different.
| emaro wrote:
| I can recommend the typewise keyboard. The keys are
| hexagonal and you use gestures to delete, restore and
| uppercase letters. Therefore you have bigger keys for the
| same amount of screen space. It's not QWERTY, but the keys
| are in the region of their QWERTY location (i.e. not
| something totally different like dvorak). I needed some
| time to get used to it, but I really like it and don't want
| to go back.
|
| Edit: rephrasing for clairity
| idank wrote:
| It's pretty hard to learn a new keyboard layout on a regular
| keyboard, let alone replace the typing experience with chords
| (multiply this by the number of languages you use). The real
| difficulty for me was putting in the time every day to
| practice, while maintaining a job. You have to be pretty
| dedicated to pull this off.
| Fortnite1 wrote:
| Kskkdkgkdkfjmmfmggmnfmm
| yitchelle wrote:
| I am wondering if other professions that uses keyboard contact a
| lot are using this? especially wondering about novelists.
| marttt wrote:
| No keyboards, but -- Astrid Lindgren, the legendary Swedish
| children's writer, wrote her manuscripts using the Melin
| shorthand system. One can browse a bunch of her notebooks
| online, side by side with a Swedish transcription [1, 2].
|
| Quoting one of the linked sources: "These manuscripts have long
| been seen as the key to new advances in research on Astrid
| Lindgren. The explanation for why no one has taken on the task
| is that Lindgren wrote in shorthand, given the well-established
| view that her stenography was almost impossible to decode. When
| we started examining the material to see whether using digital
| methods to interpret it was feasible, we saw that manual
| reading, too, was relatively simple if you know shorthand."
|
| I got curious and found a comprehensive paper about using
| computational tools (handwriting and image analysis) to
| transcribe Lindgren's manuscripts [2]. Interesting stuff.
|
| Oh, and I think Astrid Lindgren actually also worked as a
| shorthand typist during a period in her life.
|
| 1:
| https://www.uppsalauniversitet.se/en/news/article/?id=14082&...
|
| 2: https://omeka.ub.uu.se/scripto/s/al-koden/7/7/item
|
| 3: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2816/short5.pdf
| factorialboy wrote:
| Forgive me, but is steno relevant going forward? Would recording
| audio and NLP be more effective?
|
| Genuine question, no snark.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The technology is nowhere near a human level yet. There are
| people who use it, but in order to aid recognition they clearly
| repeat everything being said into a "steno-mask" for software
| transcription: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenomask
| toxicFork wrote:
| It will be relevant, because there will be people interested in
| typing. It is like how there are pencil artists even though we
| can all use Photoshop.
| mkl wrote:
| Speech recognition is terrible on specialised vocabulary,
| strong accents, low quality audio, etc. You can train it, but
| only if you have transcriptions of your audio. Steno is a good
| way to make transcriptions.
|
| I have mathematics education videos I would like subtitles for,
| all in non-US, non-UK accents, full of specialised terminology.
| In my tests, Amazon and Google's APIs were completely useless
| for this, as was Dragon. If I find the time, I would like to
| learn steno of some sort to make the subtitles and provide
| training data for future videos.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Amazon's API fails any time someone uses a slightly less than
| super common name. It was really depressing.
| 0kl wrote:
| For myself: how I think when I'm writing is somewhat different
| than when I'm speaking. I still prefer writing _and_ typing
| despite the ability to record myself.
|
| I also think we're a bit of a ways off before speech-to-text
| will work for programming...
|
| Maybe what I'm looking for isn't stenography, but chorded
| typing with the ability to break out of it when I need to.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Still will be a long, long time for such things to be viable in
| a courtroom.
| psiops wrote:
| Why would I want to learn this, besides to become a professional
| stenographer?
| eloeffler wrote:
| The crime of curiosity :)
| eggy wrote:
| That and you might get up and pass your current typing speed
| while substantially reducing wear and tear on your hands and
| wrists even if you don't have RSI issues. I bought the Georgi
| keyboard [0] and I am using Plover. The Georgi can also be
| used as a one-handed keyboard [1], and I am just getting
| around to mapping it to augment my livecoding for music
| setup. Some use it as a gamepad too. You always learn
| something unexpected when you learn something new.
|
| [0] https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi
|
| [1] https://qmk.fm/keyboards/georgi/
| wy35 wrote:
| I've been looking into the Uni Keyboard[0] for my foray into
| steno! It's pretty wild how much more accessible steno has gotten
| for hobbyists.
|
| [0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stenokeyboards/the-uni
| eloeffler wrote:
| I've been doing some digging on German (type) stenography some
| years ago. Interestingly, it seems to be rather difficult to get
| this to work fast, in my understanding due to its grammatic
| structure.
|
| Hand written stenography is still the fastest writing system of
| all for the German language and hand written stenography is still
| the default for federal government sessions and in most state
| parliaments.
|
| More about German hand written stenography:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Einheitskurzschrift
| Evilkiller wrote:
| Thank you. https://www.infobrez.com/leave-management-software
| https://www.infobrez.com/document-management-software
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