[HN Gopher] Plover: free, open-source stenography engine
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Plover: free, open-source stenography engine
Author : tosh
Score : 191 points
Date : 2023-01-08 11:01 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openstenoproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openstenoproject.org)
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| So, I've now learnt that I've been pronouncing "plover" wrong (I
| thought it rhymes with "clover", not "lover").
|
| Also, is it just me that immediately thinks of Colossal Cave
| Adventure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossal_Cave_Adventure
| everybodyknows wrote:
| American Heritage dictionary says either pronunciation is
| acceptable:
|
| https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=plover&submit.x=...
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Perhaps, but almost every birder would look at you strangely
| if you pronounced it like pl-oh-ver. Plover rhyming with
| lover is universal amongst birders.
| grahamplace wrote:
| I've always said ploh-ver (rhymes with clover), but that comes
| not from any birding experience, but from drinking Andytown's
| Snowy Plovers[1]. I believe the staff there has always said
| ploh-ver as well, but it's been a while and I could be
| mistaken.
|
| Seems like jury is out amongst birders[2]
|
| [1] https://thebolditalic.com/the-snowy-plover-is-the-
| tastiest-d...
|
| [2] https://www.10000birds.com/ploverpronunciationpoll.htm
| andry_ad wrote:
| Can somebody share their experience learning Plover as non-native
| English speaker?
| meibo wrote:
| I would love to try this some time, and then I remember that I
| spend 90% of the time on my PC programming, and then I get sad
| and settle with my qwerty.
| rgoulter wrote:
| There's plenty of room to do improve on standard QWERTY
| keyboard in a technically interesting way.
|
| Although not related to chorded-input like Plover uses, I'd
| suggest something like https://github.com/manna-harbour/miryoku
| namibj wrote:
| While good so much for APL, plover is quite suited to writing
| something like python.
|
| Also it would be likely that you wrote more words then dense
| code, just did to comments and team communication.
| charcircuit wrote:
| No, plover is suited to transcribing speech. It is not
| suitable for writing code, although it is possible to
| shoehorn it into that use case.
| mjklin wrote:
| I was considering learning Plover and even bought a keyboard to
| learn, but that was about the time that Otter.ai and other
| speech-to-text tools started becoming excellent. So I thought,
| what's the point?
|
| Can anyone convince me? I may still like to learn, but consider
| that it's much more difficult than touch typing. _Each word_ has
| its own combination that must be memorized (or sometimes a series
| of words). Think of the difference between learning the Roman
| alphabet vs learning Chinese characters. There is seemingly no
| end to it.
| bad_username wrote:
| Otter.ai is great, but it still makes mistakes, and it tends to
| make them in domain- or project-specific telerminology which
| typically is the most important to get right. Which means you
| need to proof read and fix the transcripts. This can later take
| the same amount of time as the meeting itself. If there's a way
| to make an accurate transcript on the fly, then it's better
| than voice to text.
| Twisol wrote:
| I also picked up a basic steno keyboard earlier in 2022 (the
| EcoSteno, I think). I'm no good with it yet (I'm still working
| through layout drills, honestly), but for me, the draw isn't in
| transcription or text input specifically, but in chord-based
| control over my computer more generally.
|
| A standard computer keyboard layout has ~100 keys. You can use
| various modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Shift, Meta) and combinations
| thereof to assign multiple meanings to each key, which morally
| organizes the keyboard into layers depending on which modifiers
| are active, but most layers are inconvenient to reach --
| anything beyond two modifiers gets annoying and sees limited
| use. You're almost always on the unmodified layer.
|
| A stenotype board has only ~20 keys, but the unit of input is
| an entire set of keys rather than a single key. In principle,
| you can comfortably enter chords of up to 10 keys at once,
| giving ~184,756 (20 choose 10) inputs. This is modified a bit
| by ergonomics, but it's still orders of magnitude more
| possibilities than an idealized keyboard with modifiers
| (something like 1,600).
|
| That kind of space for addressing commands begs for some kind
| of principled organization. The Plover community calls
| assignments of commands to chords "dictionaries", and they
| generally follow an internally-consistent set of rules called a
| "theory". If you're working with English input, for example,
| you'll learn a theory that lets you almost always reason out
| the chord for a word.
|
| There's nothing that limits stenographic input to
| transcription, though. You can assemble, say, a dictionary of
| Emacs commands, and assign related commands chords that share a
| common subset of keys. (Emacs is kind of like this already
| IMHO, but I am _not_ a fan of the modifier+key system -- it
| feels like the addressing space is too small, and I 'm afraid
| to customize the default keymap.)
|
| Moreover, you aren't limited to single-chord input either.
| Multi-chord input is common; you can easily define entries in
| the dictionary which are based on a sequence of chords. I
| believe (but lack the experience to confirm) that English
| dictionaries tend to be organized around syllables or syllable
| clusters; the normal English stenotype layout specifically has
| sections for initial consonent, vowel, and terminal consonant,
| and theories tend to organize around that structure. Again,
| there's no reason you can't apply the same tools to non-
| transcription inputs.
|
| I think this is a really cool input system, and for my
| interests, complementary to a regular QWERTY keyboard. I still
| want to learn a proper English theory (to avoid having to
| switch frequently between multiple keyboards!), but I mostly
| just want to have the option of chorded input in the first
| place.
| falcolas wrote:
| Speed.
|
| 150 wpm talking vs 200-250 wpm with stenography.
|
| Putting on my narrator's hat for a moment, I'd also point out
| that speaking clearly for hours on end is hard, and not
| something you can do without preparation (copious amounts of
| water, a room with little background noise, a good microphone,
| etc). Any of the preparation that's skipped makes it harder to
| speak clearly and be understood.
| vasco wrote:
| > Can anyone convince me?
|
| I find it extremely cringy to talk to a machine and get very
| annoyed at correcting transcription errors in the middle of a
| sentence or paragraph after it was transcribed. If you don't
| find it cringy to use voice assistants I guess you're just a
| different type of person and would prefer talking instead of
| typing.
| melling wrote:
| I also get annoyed at correcting voice errors. Wish it was
| better.
|
| However, I don't find it cringy. Seems like that would be a
| more natural interface. It would make mobile devices more
| productive, for example.
|
| Hang out in a park and write, develop software, etc on a
| tablet or phone. Removing the keyboard from the computer
| makes it seem more natural to me.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Cringy? That is an interesting take.
|
| I can sympathize with the dislike of voice assistance as they
| are pretty universally crap. But recording yourself
| monologuing and having it AI transcribed can feel really
| natural.
|
| I still default to typing, but whenever I'm feeling writers
| block, I'll just start thinking out loud and record it to get
| started and it works quite nicely.
| vasco wrote:
| > Cringy? That is an interesting take.
|
| Yeah I'm not sure if I'm just weird or what, but from the
| start with voice assistants I've been utterly confused that
| people want to talk to machines using a shitty interface
| and broadcasting to others what they are doing (not even
| talking about the NSA, just people in my vicinity). Imagine
| being in my room, saying out loud each URL I wanted to
| visit. It feels as cringy as if instead of turning a page
| silently in a book while I'm sitting in my room reading, I
| would instead disrupt that silence and focus by telling the
| book "TURN PAGE". That's how it feels to me when I hear
| someone say "OKAY GOOGLE", I almost physically recoil.
|
| It's like you have a nice silent interface that will be
| perfectly interpreted, and decide instead to be loud and
| imprecise and have to guess if the machine is going to
| understand you. I think maybe rather than cringy another
| word would be that it feels in bad taste. It's half about
| the "style" and half about the lack of "function" of the
| medium. It's effectively worse in terms of reliability and
| you look like someone that doesn't know how to use a
| computer all at the same time.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| "Okay google" is so gross. Totally the apex of imposed
| advertising.
|
| Physically recoil in fact, like a bitter taste in my
| mouth.
|
| However, as opposed to some assistant turning imaginary
| 'pages' in .epub, sitting alone in focused dictation is a
| really great way to explore your mind and have free
| roaming thought processes.
|
| It is also not new in any sense, e.g., Dostoyevsky
| dictated _The Idiot_ to a stenographer.
| dinkleberg wrote:
| Ah, I get what you mean. For any interaction, I fully
| agree with you. I would hate to be in a room with someone
| who is interacting with their machine through voice.
|
| I was reading the parent of your post as using these
| speech-to-text tools for dictation, not for interaction.
| I think they can be quite useful for dictation (if they
| can interpret your voice well).
| melling wrote:
| That brings up the other natural user interface that's
| missing, which is gesture recognition.
|
| https://atap.google.com/soli/
|
| I suppose it'll take another generation before people
| start to wonder why everyone used to hunch over a
| computer "in the old days"
| retrac wrote:
| I wouldn't use the word cringy myself, but I think I get
| where they're coming from. Reading the output of speech
| recognition a few seconds behind is jarring. Constant game
| of anticipation. Will it get that name or term right? Nope.
| Now I have to pause dictation, go back, and fix it. It's
| more involved than tapping backspace a couple times, the
| feedback is less instant, and that means more things I have
| to keep in my working memory, which is non-existent.
| eggy wrote:
| You don't need to memorize each word's combination, although
| you eventually will as you type them frequently enough. It's
| shorthand for typing, where you can transcribe any word. You
| are chording syllables and in many cases, entire words, but you
| are not spelling each letter of a word. I am no steno expert,
| and my speed is not there yet, but I am benefiting from less
| finger movement and stress. It is also neat to rewire your
| brain to do something different. I am learning Colemak layout
| as well for touch typing.
| tsuujin wrote:
| Sometimes you need to both type and listen to other people
| talking, so talking over them would be pretty rude. Also typing
| with text to speech in a public place would really rob you of
| privacy.
|
| Honestly for me steno is about ergonomics. It seems like steno
| should be harder than normal typing but you're making so many
| fewer strokes that it takes a ton of strain off of your hands.
| Typing faster is a happy side effect.
| elil17 wrote:
| I've found that ZipChord offers the best trade of between
| convenience (does not require N-key rollover, can continue to
| type normally on a QWERTY keyboard for most words) and speed. It
| lets you type a chord of several characters at once to type a
| word (e.g. I have "eml" set to type my email address and "bw" to
| type "between").
|
| The recent 2.0 beta release is a game changer, it has gotten
| really good at distinguishing character entry from chording (e.g.
| if you type need and hit the e and d key at the same time by
| accident, it won't trigger your "ed" chord).
|
| Only works on windows though.
|
| https://github.com/psoukie/zipchord/releases
| melling wrote:
| Over the past decade there have been some interesting discussions
| about Plover on HN
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| The video in the first result was good:
|
| https://youtu.be/Wpv-Qb-dB6g
| dang wrote:
| I found it hard to pick out the ones that are about this
| project. This one is. Others?
|
| _Plover is a free, open-source stenography engine_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27602077 - June 2021 (124
| comments)
| shric wrote:
| I believe all of the results from the first page of GP's
| search are about this except the ones that mention "browser
| fileshare".
| dang wrote:
| Ah thanks! Here's a better list:
|
| _Plover is a free, open-source stenography engine_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27602077 - June 2021
| (124 comments)
|
| _Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM (2013) [video]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8510409 - Oct 2014
| (119 comments)
|
| _Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936210 - Dec 2013 (4
| comments)
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