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Type 225 Words per Minute with a Stenographic Keyboard (Video)
Joshua Lifton says you can learn to type at 225 words per minute with his Stenosaurus, an open source stenography keyboard that has a not-there-yet website with nothing but the words, "Stenography is about to evolve," on it as of this writing. If you've heard of Joshua it's probably because he's part of the team behind Crowd Supply, which claims, "Our projects raise an average of $43,600, over twice as much as Kickstarter." A brave boast, but there's plenty of brainpower behind the company. Joshua, himself. has a PhD from MIT, which according to his company bio means, "he's devoted a significant amount of his time learning how to make things that blink." But the steno machine is his own project, independent of Crowd Supply.
Stenotype machines are usually most visible when court reporters are using them. They've been around since the 1800s, when their output was holes in paper tape. Today's versions are essentially chorded keyboards that act as computer input devices. (Douglas Engelbart famously showed off a chorded keyboard during his 1968 Mother of All Demos.) Today you have The Open Steno Project, and Stenosaurus is a member. And while Joshua's project may not have an actual website quite yet, it has an active blog. And the 225 WPM claim? Totally possible. The world record for English language stenography is 360 WPM. And you thought the Dvorak Keyboard was fast. Hah! (Alternate Video Link)
Stenotype machines are usually most visible when court reporters are using them. They've been around since the 1800s, when their output was holes in paper tape. Today's versions are essentially chorded keyboards that act as computer input devices. (Douglas Engelbart famously showed off a chorded keyboard during his 1968 Mother of All Demos.) Today you have The Open Steno Project, and Stenosaurus is a member. And while Joshua's project may not have an actual website quite yet, it has an active blog. And the 225 WPM claim? Totally possible. The world record for English language stenography is 360 WPM. And you thought the Dvorak Keyboard was fast. Hah! (Alternate Video Link)
Sorry I worked for a company that built Stenomachines and wrote software for Court Reporters.
1. Learning to write Steno is hard. It is very hard. A lot of full time students never break 180, 225 is what you need to graduate.
2. The market is small.
3. You have several companies that have been in the market for decades. Stenograph, Advantage Software, ProCat, and Stenovations are probably the market leaders.
4. The requirement for support is super high.
5. The market is shrinking.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
No discussion of open source steno is complete without mentioning the excellent Plover program. If you're interested at all in steno, check it out:
http://plover.stenoknight.com/
I'm sorry for being negative here, but listening to how stenography is "about to evolve" makes me laugh. In this day and age where every damn thing is captured on video and audio already, questioning the validity of a stenographer and the specialized equipment they require to do the exact same job isn't exactly an exercise in futility.
Couldn't you just take any keyboard and write macros using http://www.autohotkey.com/ and do the same thing? :-)
Neither of his demo units are functional?
He has no idea how to even use the thing he's invented?!?!
I don't think I'll be investing any time soon.
Take a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for stenotype to see why using a stenographic keyboard for coding is such a laughable idea.
Stenography relies heavily on a highly-trained stenographer to do the recording, and on a similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English. Trying to use that for writing code, where you don't have the redundancy and patterns of English, is a bit like trying to use Swype to transcribe telephone numbers. Wrong tool for the task, period.
and i was thinking "how the hell can you type steganographically even faster than normal?
Race Qwerty vs Dvorak vs Steno at Type Racer.
Clearly some people type much faster than a measly 120 WPM (as TFA indicated) using a qwerty layout.
This would be an utter disaster for programming. I think I'll keep my QUERTY.
q898(^*$*EUIDXEZ{Pm;vd80eGUIOIO:>P{
{}.
det6767ir6768P)I*)&%B(()_}K>?YIBV$WCJ!!!!!
It worked, but came out as 'hell it suks', whereupon I got a fit and almost choked,
and a subsequent effort at 10 wpm was spent to correct the typos. At that time I felt
a dunce, and I had a program that didn't do much of anything surprising anymore.
This post deserves a thoughtful response, because I think it has the potential to give a lot of people the wrong impression about what Josh is going for. In fact I really have to wonder whether you even bothered to follow any of these links. 1. Mr. Lifton makes no claim that learning steno isn't hard. In fact, one motivation for developing low cost steno hardware and software (as well as education) is precisely because of its difficulty. Imagine if the cost of learning to ride a bike was upwards of $10,000 -- including the initial purchase, the cost of lessons, and ongoing maintenance. Biking would then be something that would only be worthwhile to an elite few, and there would be an alarmingly high failure rate. Happily, anyone can get a serviceable bike for $300 and immediately start commuting to work. And yet this is precisely what's missing from stenography today, and that's what makes this idea so revolutionary. With a lower barrier to entry, it won't matter that not everyone is able to make it to 180wpm. If they plateau, fine. At least they won't have blown their savings in the process. It will be worth it once you can steno as fast as you type -- then you'll be able to justify making the switch (no pun intended). 2 & 5 -- both statements about "the market." That it's small and shrinking. For starters, it's improbable that these are both true. If it's small, regression to the mean is likely. Second, you're presupposing that these guys won't make every effort to expand the market to more people. And lowering the costs of entry are meant to do exactly that: if people are able to buy these machines that become useful as soon as they're able to substitute them for their existing keyboards, and they're able to reach that point quickly, it's not a hard case to make. I think you might even be conflating two different things -- the market for this particular hardware and the market for court reporting and closed captioning. I think I've addressed the former adequately, and the latter is anything but a normal "market." It's a function of various state and federal regulations, to do with verbatim reporting requirements for court proceedings, administrative hearings, and meeting minutes as well as accessibility regulations like the Americans With Disabilities Act. 3 -- The fact that we've currently got an oligopoly is all the more reason to rock the boat. Nuff said there. 4 -- I assume you mean that the "requirement for support" from the aforementioned companies is super high. Again, Mr. Lifton's objective in making this open source hardware and software is to reduce those ongoing costs (and dependence on this tiny cartel of manufacturers). There's no reason to think he won't be successful in that endeavor. The current state of the industry reminds me a great deal of the classic "razors and blades" strategy -- rope people in on the razors, and charge an arm and a leg on the blades. Except that in this case, the "razors" cost a pretty penny, too.
I'm working on a machine to bring Morse code into the digital age. Please back my kickstarter campaign.
Thank you.
Awww, I read this as a SteGanographic keyboard, i.e. one that hides as you type. I thought the 225 WPM was due to all the noise words it added or something.
Most people speak at under 150 wpm, anyway, and...
The future here is not using your hands, but is 100% in the speech-to-text area. My phone does a pretty amazing job today, all things considered. Just the tip of the iceberg.
What would you prefer -- a funky keyboard and reams of training, or a tiny microphone and no training?
Seriously, the future of computer interfacing lies in Speech-to-Text, in-eye displays, and something ranging from an earphone to a bone conduction implant. And that's just until they tie the things right to your nervous system.
I love my keyboard, and I'm really, really fast and accurate with it, but I know its time is going to come.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Beyond a certain point, I agree. There's a world of difference in readability between code written by people who are comfortable typing and people who type very slowly. If typing is a chore, there's always a temptation to use very short variable and function names and avoid comments. If typing a comment is something you can do while you're thinking about what the next bit of code should do, then you end up with much more readable code because the tendency is to write a description of what the code should do (and, importantly, why) in a comment, and then write the code.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think we can all relax about the throwaway example he tossed out there about coding with steganography. We can all see how it's a bad idea, so the 20 people who've made that same point now can rest assured that their unique insight is appreciated.
I would've loved to be able to do ~180 wpm when taking notes in university. For me, notes will always be far better than a recording because they're much easier to skim than video. Also the act of noting increases retention, and you can choose what is worth writing down and insert add your own thoughts or questions live, rather than by reviewing the video later (which, given the time crunch of university, usually doesn't/can't happen). This is why I still take notes, even while also recording audio to catch the sentences that I inevitably can't transcribe in time.
If there was some note-taking app that let you type steganographically, draw on the notes, and insert photos (e.g. of the whiteboard) in-line as you take them, that honestly would be a killer app that I'd invest time learning steganography for. (The time would come out of my Duolinguo budget; sorry France! :P)
Hey /. devs: could we maybe take the <a>link</a> [website you're linking to] format that's currently in comments, and drop that into summaries? The first link in this article is to a startlingly loud YouTube video, and it would be helpful to know on this and other links where I'm headed beforehand.
Yes, I could've checked the status bar first, but then you could say that about comment links.
Nothing posted to
Stenography relies heavily on a highly-trained stenographer to do the recording, and on a similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English. Trying to use that for writing code, where you don't have the redundancy and patterns of English, is a bit like trying to use Swype to transcribe telephone numbers. Wrong tool for the task, period.
I wonder why parent was modded as +4 insightful? There is no need for "similarly highly-trained individual to turn the record into recognizable English" because transcription software (commercial like digitalCat or opensource like Plover) converts keystrokes into the text. On the fly.
Nobody is going to code at 220 wpm. But what about writing decent documentation? I wish I was able to write documentation, comments in code and emails much faster then I do.