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)

Comments

Now this is funny.

[LWATCDR]

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.

Re:Now this is funny.

[shadowrat]

Yeah, I can't imagine who (in my admittedly small circle of friends) would really need or want this. It seems like it's great for transcribing speech, or any situation where you are trying to parse a stream of language and the rate of the stream isn't dictated by you. I don't really think WPM is the bottleneck for other endeavors. As a programmer, i just assume it's not really suited to all the punctuation in my favorite languages. More than that though, my typing speed isn't a bottleneck. The bottleneck is envisioning the idea and subsequently debugging the resulting code.

I'm not a writer, but i imagine that's similar. Is anyone really being held back from writing the next great american novel because they only type at 90 wpm? Or is it just that they don't really have a good idea.

Re:Now this is funny.

[khasim]

Many people would be happy to increase their typing speed from 75 wpm to say 150 wpm.

Except that they'd have to put in a LOT of hours training on those systems to get that increase.

And for most of them, the majority of time is spent thinking about what to type.

Re:Now this is funny.

[Anonymous Coward]

You really want to have juries looking back at statements and thinking, "Damn you Auto-Correct!"

Re:Now this is funny.

[vux984]

Quite a few writers do 'stream-of-consciousness' writing and then go back and edit it... If we're lucky. :p

But even them I doubt really are planning to go to school to learn stenography.

More than that though, my typing speed isn't a bottleneck. The bottleneck is envisioning the idea and subsequently debugging the resulting code.

Sounds about right.

Is anyone really being held back from writing the next great american novel because they only type at 90 wpm?

Doubtful, these modern hipster authors are bragging that they pecked it out on a smartphone keyboard; and we're lucky if we don't have to read it in typical texting shorthand.

Re:Now this is funny.

[The Grim Reefer]

many courtrooms do not allow recording or electronic devices. thus, the courtroom sketches and transcribing of proceedings in realtime.

Except the court reporter is generally exempt from such rules. I used to be one. Most of the time the record is keyed real time. However you can't always get it all and be 100% every time. The recording is used to clean up the transcription after the fact.

The ban of recording devices is for the general public and reporters.

Re:Now this is funny.

[NotDrWho]

Typing a lot of wpm isn't the problem. It's picking the *right* words that slows you down.

Re:Now this is funny.

[DanJP_]

I was a stenographer for a short while, I could type at 225+ words per minute with something like 98% accuracy. Please believe me when I say that this is a foolish project, no matter what their reasoning.

To start with, Stenography isn't realistic for the average person who wants to increase their typing speed (ie: secretaries, journalists, writers, and especially not coders). I can't even express how hard it is to reach 225 words per minute. The goal is to have a student get to that point in 2 years, but I ran into plenty of people that took 3 years, and one or two that took 4. This is with them learning it for a career, not as some side hobby, so they were highly motivated. I think some people's brains are better wired to become good at stenography, and there's really not much you can do about it if you're not one of those people.

When you're trying to learn Stenography, the focus is all about speed, speed, speed, and accuracy can come later. You're taught a theory on how to write words which is designed to let you write quickly and without conflict (the theories are all phonetic based, so when I say conflicts, I mean something like: how to write "cell", and how to write "sell"), and these theories are basically languages in their own right. The word dime in the theory I learned, for example, is written TKAOEUPL. Why? Because speed. This translates to D (tk together is D) AOEU (long I) PL (M).

What I'm trying to get across here is that you want to shorten everything down into one keystroke, because speed is the most important thing. People would abbreviate entire sentences down to one key stroke. So while you and I might have been taught the same theory, I wouldn't be able to read what you wrote, and you wouldn't be able to read what I wrote. In order to reach that mythical 225, you need to pick up abbreviations, steal stuff from other theories (usually unknowingly), or my favorite, make up your own abbreviations on the fly and then struggle to remember what the hell that meant later. Not only are you taught a language, you take that language and morph it into a language of your own. This is very error prone, leads to you guessing based on context what you meant when you wrote some crazy combination of keys, and it requires countless hours of building your dictionary so the computer will recognize WAO as window, for example.

The marketing talk is that you can write 225 words per minute, but the reality is that you're writing 225 words per minute, and then spending quite a lot of time deciphering what you wrote, fixing typos, adding in grammar, and adding in formatting. This is all a pain in the ass, and in my mind makes it entirely unrealistic for someone such as a journalist or writer. In the case of programmers, I can't imagine how it would even work at all.

That's for the average guy. I think the project is also pretty foolish if their goal is to transform the industry. Stenography is a dead end in terms of a career. It's going to be automated. There's no reason for someone to have to sit and type what he or she hears using this ridiculous system. If they want to transform the industry, they should focus on making speech transcription software better, because that's where the future is. The companies in the market now who are selling stenographer software and equipment need to die because they're abusing their position of power and overcharging for their products, but this isn't the way to do it.

Plover

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Plover

[plover]

Damn. I'm just interested in plovers.

The new and improved buggy whip

[geekmux]

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.

hum

[Charliemopps]

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. :-)

Stenography for CODING? LOL!

[jeffb (2.718)]

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.

Re:Stenography for CODING? LOL!

[pseudofrog]

Stenography for coding:

Ta-da!

Time for a Race

[psyclone]

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.

Morse code

[marciot]

I'm working on a machine to bring Morse code into the digital age. Please back my kickstarter campaign.

Thank you.