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Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

openstenoproject.org

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Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#61

Post by bsanr »

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).

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#62

Post by jhgb »

woodrowbarlow wrote: post #58
jhgb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

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.

Ehm... https://www.britannica.com/topic/stenotypy

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#63

Post by pessimizer »

factorialboy wrote: post #5

Forgive me, but is steno relevant going forward? Would recording audio and NLP be more effective? Genuine question, no snark.

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

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#64

Post by DavidVoid »

xkfm wrote: post #51

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 ty…

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

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#65

Post by DavidVoid »

dmos62 wrote: post #52
xkfm wrote: post #51

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 ty…

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.

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...

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#66

Post by charcircuit »

ArchieMaclean wrote: post #34
charcircuit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#67

Post by charcircuit »

comma_at wrote: post #35
charcircuit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.)

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.

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#69

Post by snugghash »

mkl wrote: post #11
factorialboy wrote: post #5

Forgive me, but is steno relevant going forward? Would recording audio and NLP be more effective? Genuine question, no snark.

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 Dr…

Is Otter.ai's tech any better?

Re: Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

#70

Post by snugghash »

bodge5000 wrote: post #18
fnord77 wrote: post #4

> 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.

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 unde…

I think it's pretty daft to not consider an investment (by all of humanity, which I get is hard) which can improve efficiency by a lot, for all of time until we direct BMI.

At some point in the sliding scale it becomes worthwhile to care about and implement

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