ploversteno

I'm certified at 260 words per minute, but even so Jonathan Coulton's "I Feel Fantastic" was too much for me. I only got 77% accuracy. Can you do better?

Download the 4-song demo of Steno Hero at http://stenoarcade.com or via Steam. Works with any steno machine or qwerty keyboard.

Each finger can press up to two keys at a time (top row, bottom row, or both rows together). Right pinky can press up to four at a time (two rows plus two columns), and right index can press up to three at a time (two rows plus asterisk column).

Weird. You're right; it doesn't work. Must have something to do with the layer Plover's using for keyboard output. That's frustrating. I'll bring it up with the developers.

It's open source, but you'd have to ask the developer to send you an apk, I think. Or compile your own, I guess: https://github.com/brentn/StenoIME

It would be cool to see a video demonstrating this using the same snippet of code! If you decide to make one, let me know, and I'll link it on the Plover blog.

Beautiful analogy. I couldn't agree more.

You really need a minimum of 16-key rollover to do steno properly. Otherwise you're just really constrained in the number of chords you're able to write.

I've thought about having a sort of collaborative dictionary, updated in realtime with entries weighted by how frequently people use them over a certain period of time. I'm not sure how practical it would actually turn out to be, but it's an interesting idea.

The Android app is actually pretty decent; you use it Swype-style, but rather than employing Swype's predictive method, it's 100% deterministic, so you know what you're going to get every time.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brentandjo...

Yeah, one of the things I love about steno (as opposed to predictive systems like voice recognition or autocorrect) is its 100% determinism. That tiny pause of hesitation to wait and see whether a word has come out properly is so completely disruptive of flow for me. In the most recent video, I basically did the whole thing just keeping my eyes on the text I was transcribing from, rather than watching my output. You can see me correcting a few errors, but that's because my fingers told me that I'd made one, which prompted me to look over and figure out what I'd screwed up. Otherwise I could trust that whenever I hit a stroke, it translated as the exact same thing every time, so I never have to keep hovering over my text watching for errors. It makes the whole process way more pleasurable.

Ooh, hadn't heard of this before. Great find! Thanks!

It was originally inspired by Typestriker, which I used quite a bit to get me through my early days in steno school: http://www.acid-play.com/download/typestriker

There are a few action arcade-style games on qwertysteno.com: http://qwertysteno.com/Games/

But yeah, making a comprehensive steno tutorial video game is pretty much at the top of our list right now. We've even got some funding set aside for art assets and stuff; it's just about finding the right developers at this point.

I'm in talks with a small NYC private school to possibly start some middle schoolers on an informal course in steno. We'll see if they take to it. I'm hoping it'll be like ducks to water. Stay tuned!

Also, here's a transcript of the PyCon video for people who don't have time to watch it: http://openstenoproject.org/transcripts/pycon-2013-video-tra...

Thanks very much! Plover also has its own Wiki: http://stenoknight.com/wiki/Main_Page

Hot off the press: Please view my latest steno coding video, where I transcribe a somewhat longer snippet of Python from the Plover codebase!

http://youtu.be/jRFKZGWrmrM

I'm still just a Python novice, so obviously I didn't write this code originally; I'm just transcribing it from a text file into Vim to demonstrate how easily and fluently code can be written with steno. It's not primarily about speed, but about chunking commands and words into single strokes, as opposed to breaking them down into individual letters and typing each letter out one by one as in qwerty. Also notice how simple error correction is; an incorrect word is deleted with a single stroke.

For more information, visit: http://openstenoproject.org

A little more commentary on the difference between realtime stenography and automated speech recognition: http://blog.stenoknight.com/2012/05/cart-problem-solving-ser...

Not really. When I'm in steno mode, it's like I'm speaking to myself in a different dialect, but when I'm in English mode it's all normal again. Like, this is how I would pronounce the previous sentence in steno:

When I'm n stoin mode, ts like I'm speeg to mysef nay difrt dailect, but when I'm in glish mode ts aul nol sgen.

That's a particularly clear-cut example, but what about something like "my great" and "migrate"? 33 million hits for one, 37 million hits for the other. They're both pretty likely to come up, so it's important to have separate strokes for both. On the other hand, what about "mycolic" and "my colic"? Mycolic has more hits, but it's also a more specialized word; if you're not captioning in a scientific setting, you're very unlikely to hear it. On the other hand, while a phrase like "my colicky baby" appears less frequently on Google, you're more likely to encounter it in general conversation than you are a specialized word like "mycolic". So a lot of these decisions depend on the context in which you're likely to use them. They can sometimes get tricky.

Because all proprietary steno software builds in a 1.5-second buffer between when the stenographer enters the stroke and when the stroke is transmitted to an external program. Imagine having to wait 1.5 seconds for each command to execute. It's infuriating. Plover is the only steno software that uses a length-based stroke buffer rather than a timing-based one, so it sends commands immediately, making it work beautifully with Vim and every other external program I've tried it with. The difference in usability is startling.

True, sadly, but it's also unfortunately true that a lot of people in steno schools arguably shouldn't be there, because they don't have the technical or language processing skills that stenographers need to do their jobs. Virtually all those skills are possessed by coders -- especially the ones who play video games and have honed their hand-eye coordination -- so I anticipate a much better success rate among geeks than you can find among steno students, many of whom have an unrealistic idea that steno is a low-skill, well-paying clerical profession.

Yup! Ploversteno = Mirabai Knight, cofounder of the Plover Project, professional stenographer and novice Python coder.

It takes students in vocational steno schools six months to a year. As of now, they're our only source of hard data, because steno has been financially inaccessible to people not pursuing it as a career. My hunch is that a steno tutorial game will produce significantly quicker results than the current steno school dictation model, and that programmers (and other technical types) will likely pick up steno skills at a much faster rate than the average person currently attending a steno school.

Spot on. ASL is a really beautiful language, but it's incredibly difficult to learn, partly because its grammar is spacial rather than linear, which can be a real mindbending experience for speakers of oral languages. I've been learning it for three years, and I'm still only conversational; nowhere near fluent.

Source: http://research.gallaudet.edu/Demographics/deaf-US.php

http://www.hearingconnection.org/hearing_loss_statistics.htm...

2% is actually a little generous based on this data, but I like to round up. 35 to 36 million people report some degree of hearing loss, out of around 311 million people in the US, or about 10% of the population. In 1972, an estimated 642,000 people signed ASL at home, and about 375,000 of those were deaf. It's somewhat likely that the number of signers has gone down since then, due to the decrease in rubella (a significant cause of childhood deafness), the oral deaf and cochlear implant movements, et cetera. It's unlikely that the number of signers has increased. So assuming there are still around 375,000 deaf/HoH signers in the country, that's 375,000 out of 35 million people with hearing loss, or just about 1%. I put the extra percent in there for wiggle room.

Thank you! It's so refreshing to talk with coders about this stuff; non-computery types so often assume it's a solved problem, because they don't realize how lossy a format spoken language actually is.

Also useful: http://stenoknight.com/plover/qwertytosteno.png

The newer USB keyboards with n-key rollover don't have this limit. I'm able to depress 22 keys at a time on a Sidewinder X4 ($45) or a Filco Majestouch ($120) connected via USB and have them all register perfectly. Yep, the steno layout is only two rows for fingers, one row for thumbs, and one meta-row for numbers. There's very little movement of the hands required, which makes it both ergonomic and efficient. Chords of 1 to 22 keys are mapped to syllables, words, or phrases. It's a lot like playing a piano.

It's the fluency that steno lends to composing text or code that's far more useful than the speed. Tab-complete requires that you pause for a short time to read your options while you flip through them. Steno is entirely deterministic; you can implement the command in one stroke without twisting your hands around (unlike metacommands, especially those used in emacs, which can result in the dreaded emacs claw), and you know exactly what the result is going to be. Because you're writing entire words with each stroke, if you accidentally hit the wrong key, you'll be able to reverse the error in a single "delete last stroke" command, rather than having to backspace 20 times to correct a letter transposition error you made several words ago. Qwerty requires commands and variables to be broken down into minuscule portions, with the potential for error occurring each time a key is deployed. Steno reduces that error potential drastically by chunking words and variables into single-stroke entities, requiring less vigilance for error and allowing for a much smoother flow of thought and composition.