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Open Steno Project: Bringing Stenography to Everyone
- vkaku 7y agoNeat. The list art of taking down dictations fast. Wish I knew it in school (and that they had allowed it in school). I hated dictation but for some people, it's a job, I guess.
- DennisP 7y agoNot only dictation, you can also use it to type your own work at 150+ words per minute. I've seen fiction writers say it helped a lot, not just for raw typing speed but because it kept them in flow.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoHeh wonder what the readers thought.
- skyyler 7y agoWith a good editor / editorial staff the reader won't notice at all.
- DennisP 7y agoAlso the authors could spend as much time as they want doing revisions, and a lot of that would go faster too.
- praptak 7y agoProbably anything between "stream of consciousness" and "what a clearly expressed piece of prose", depending on the amount of editing afterwards.
- pgeorgi 7y agoLooks like a project to build a stenotype machine (chorded keyboard entry), not to promote stenography which more commonly means various techniques of shorthand writing.
- TylerE 7y agoThe two are linked, since existing commercial steno keyboards are $$$$$$.
- jesserosenthal 7y agoIt's the project behind Plover (https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Beginner's-Guide:-Get-Started-with-Plover https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Beginner's-G...), a cross-platform free steno program that works with normal (NKRO) keyboards and steno machines. There are also a number of hobbyist steno machines, made by the community, that run ~$100, instead of >$1000 for a real machine. https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi https://www.gboards.ca/product/georgi https://stenomod.blogspot.com/ https://stenomod.blogspot.com/ I'm typing this, in Plover, on a georgi.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cosarara 7y agoIs the use of stenography related to the liberal use of commas in your comment?
- arthurcolle 7y agocould be the dude's writing style
- mncharity 7y ago> normal (NKRO) keyboards My brand new ThinkPad laptop has a keyboard with a pleasant feel, and a high-end GPU for (among other things) a 3D hand-pose human interface. But the keyboard is 2 KRO. :/ After decades of looking, and with screen-comparable AR coming in next year, I kind of expect to move on from the laptop form factor before ever finding one that doesn't feel like an HID facepalm.
- jaredwiener 7y agoI met someone at a conference who was both a stenographer and a developer. Because the dictionaries which convert the keystrokes into words are just JSON, he changed them to common commands/code snippets. Watching him code was mindblowing.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rinchik 7y agoThis is awesome! learning to write in shorthand was in my bucket list, but this! This is way cooler. imagine writing code as fast as your thoughts are? Well, also a note: programming is not typing. it's 90% thinking. But at the end of the thought process, it just burns to turn your thoughts into working code ASAP! It would be so nice to streamline, optimize the process of the thought to code transfer. Until mind readers are invented, steno is a great solution
- Enginerrrd 7y ago>imagine writing code as fast as your thoughts are? I'm skeptical that typing is the bottleneck you think it is on the code-writing front.
- buzzkillington 7y agoI'd go one step further and say that allowing you to type faster just makes your programs worse. >Why should I spend time implementing this logic as a function when I can just use macros to type it 5 times with 5 key strokes?
- rinchik 7y agoWell, Mr. BuzzKillington(!), I’d disagree. I’d argue that fast thought to code ratio would give you wings! Surely you’ll type bugs in faster (valid point) but you’ll fix those also as fast! Overall development progress is incomparable.
- praptak 7y agoI recently started practicing Teeline shorthand. It's a system for pen and paper. I might not even use it in practice but it's cool to learn by itself. It's pretty clever and sort of layered. Letters are the first layer, rules for connecting them are the second, then there are short notations for common words and word groups, then there are shorthands for common suffixes, prefixes and letter combinations. It is satisfactory to lets you make a shorthand even shorter.
- tomcooks 7y agoAny pointer on how to study and practice this?
- praptak 7y agoThe "Shorthand Sue Teaches Teeline" YouTube series take maybe 20 mins together and give a very good basic understanding. A decent web intro: http://realerthinks.com/teeline-for-the-curious-a-story-of-learning-things-because-i-can/ http://realerthinks.com/teeline-for-the-curious-a-story-of-l... A text on some general rules (intermediate level?): http://natashacspencer.blogspot.com/2010/10/introduction-to-teeline.html http://natashacspencer.blogspot.com/2010/10/introduction-to-... A searchable dictionary, good as a reference: http://realerthinks.com/a-searchable-teeline-dictionary/ http://realerthinks.com/a-searchable-teeline-dictionary/ I also bought the "The Teeline Gold Course Bk". It's good. Another one which I bought (used for a few dollars) but not yet opened is "Teeline Gold Word List". HTH
- Multicomp 7y agoI agree although I'm using the older "Teeline fast" book. I want my writing to be faster while taking notes in meetings and slightly obufiscated if I drop my journal somewhere, it still needs to be interpreted by me years or possibly decades down the road, or by my successors after I'm gone. That means that I needed to use teeline over Gregg or Pitman because the ladder are designed for quickly transcribing while you know the subject matter, and that's if you really approach those shorthand notes taken after decades can be extremely difficult to interpret back to English words. Teeline is grounded in the English letters themselves and so as long as you're consistent with your rules and or consistently inconsistent with your house rules, then someone who learns to interpret a few of your words can slowly but surely unearth all of your words.
- JoshTriplett 7y agoAlso see the awesome https://twitter.com/stenoknight https://twitter.com/stenoknight , who does live captioning at various Open Source events. Always impressive and high-quality.
- eitland 7y agoI guess those were the ones I saw at an Angular conference in London. It was a totally amazing experience, and for a non native speaker allowed me to catch every joke and nuance (or so I think). At one time the speaker was talking about the scaffolding system of Angular that I can't remember the name of right now and it became a bit recursive with templates of templates and that was the only time when the stenographer lagged slightly, the speaker realized and took it a bit further until the stenographer realized it and made a witty comment instead.
- JoshTriplett 7y agoAt BangBangCon, they managed to fully capture the nuance of audio-based humor, to the point that their captions made funny things funnier. Watch the video from BangBangCon 2019 on steganography for one example; the presenter hid data in audio files, so the stenographer carefully described the data-enabled files as sounding "perfectly normal, unsuspicious".
- thepete2 7y agoIs there an international stenographic system? The one on this site only works for English as far as I can tell.
- yorwba 7y agoThe underlying dictionaries Plover uses can be changed: https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Dictionary-Format#strokes-and-dictionaries https://github.com/openstenoproject/plover/wiki/Dictionary-F... So if you want to optimize for typing another language, you can swap in corresponding dictionaries and type away. There's only the slight problem that there might not yet exist any for your language...
- zozbot234 7y agoIt's not that easy, since mnemonic key labels (the actual assignment from keys to "letters") might change depending on the overall system. Some stenotyping systems may even use subtly-different keyboard designs, that wouldn't match the stenotype keyboards Open Steno Project was designed to work with.
- thepete2 7y agoHm, I'm sure there is one for German. I wish the project would aim to provide an international solution
- kqr 7y agoPlover has the great drawback that you need a complete dictionary for it for any language you want to use with it, because it's based on phonetics. I have dabbled in creating an orthographic stenography solution for international use, but never quite finished it: https://github.com/kqr/qweyboard https://github.com/kqr/qweyboard If I could be paid to work half a year (or just a month or two) to work on anything I wanted, this would be it.
- cjbprime 7y agoSteno is great! But it takes a few years of hard effort to learn, and voice-to-speech tech is excellent now.
- rinchik 7y ago> voice-to-speech tech is excellent now I wouldn't say that it's excellent now. It still has a long way to go. Small example, try enabling captions in Google's meet. Those are awful. Don't get a lot of words right, if you have an accent it's even worse. And distinguishing between different people talking? Forget about it...
- cjbprime 7y agoIt's true, that's terrible. But it'll probably get fixed in less time than it would take me to become proficient in steno.
- taeric 7y agoAlthough, speaking to the computer doesn't exactly lend itself to an office setting. :)
- tutanchamun 7y agoYou can use a steno mask so your voice doesn't disturbs others but also so that the voices from coworkers and other background noise doesn't disturb the speech-to-text software. It would look funky though, and I've read from people having problems with their voice after an 8 hour day speaking software. https://talktech.com/wp-content/uploads/img_4924.jpg https://talktech.com/wp-content/uploads/img_4924.jpg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3WJubnhMEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3WJubnhMEQ
- taeric 7y agoI'll take a keyboard any day. Problem is probably not just speaking software. Talking for that long is tough. Period.
- Karrot_Kream 7y agoThere's a fantastic, tight-knit community associated with the Open Steno Project. I'm in the process of learning steno, and https://didoesdigital.com/typey-type/ https://didoesdigital.com/typey-type/ is a fantastic page that does drills that builds up steno skills.
- SuperPaintMan 7y agoDon't forget The Art Of Chording! It's pretty much the go to guide on understanding Plover Theory! https://www.artofchording.com/ https://www.artofchording.com/
- vanderZwan 7y agoSee also this contalk from 2013 by Mirabai Knight: "Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpv-Qb-dB6g
- sohkamyung 7y agoMy bad: I mis-read that headline as "Steganography" and as I read the comments, I kept wondering how making typing faster would obscure communications. :-)
- hinkley 7y agoI was quite confused by why someone was sharing a non sequitur about how fast a steganographer they met could type. Why is this relevant to the story?
- z3t4 7y agoAnyone remember texting on a feature phone using the numeric keys? I never learned it myself. But those good at it would still beat me typing on a virtual keyboard on my smartphone. I wonder if you could actually program using just 12 keys as well!?
- thunderbong 7y agoIt was called A9 mode, I think!
- klez 7y agoI think you meant T9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)
- thunderbong 7y agoRight! Thanks. I remember having gotten quite proficient in it!
- klez 7y agoYeah, me too. It's incredible how fast it can be, when words are in the dictionary. I need to type code in my messages sometimes (like quick help for a colleague). I think it would be a nightmare with T9.
- iod 7y ago(Repost of previous comment from about a month ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21233836 as it seemed relevant, although I haven't progressed much in my proficiency yet) I have begun the path to learning stenography. Steno involves chording, or pressing multiple keys at once. Multiple keys at once means greatly improving the information density of when you type allowing professionals to type 240 words per minute (realtime), which is just not possible on single-key-at-a-time keyboards. Unfortunately most commonly available, non-gaming keyboards do not natively support multiple keys at once which is also known as n-key rollover (nkro). I ended up buying a pre-assembled, fully opensource hacker keyboard Ergodox EZ⁰, and have a custom layout firmware that matches up with the open steno project¹ . From here I am using Querty Steno² to practice my chording. Here is an example video someone did of using steno for programming a simple FizzBuzz on a different keyboard on YouTube³. In my opinion, if anyone is looking to really take their typing to the next level, chording is the only way and Dvorak/Colmak/single-key-at-a-time-layouts will never really get you there. ⁰ https://ergodox-ez.com https://ergodox-ez.com ¹ http://www.openstenoproject.org http://www.openstenoproject.org ² http://qwertysteno.com http://qwertysteno.com ³ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBBiri3CD6w
- clarry 7y agoYeah, not convinced. Yet another youtube video where someone had to first build and try to memorize their custom dictionary preloaded with the specific words they are going to use to write the program they have in their head... At least this one actually seems to remember their inputs well enough, I wonder how many times they practiced? I've seen similar videos before and it is hilarious to watch when they're trying to recall the chords they programmed. I don't see this scaling for real projects with thousands and thousands of complicated identifiers, camelcase, crazy abbreviatin, acronyms, etc. Each project is going to have its own set of identifiers and you're going to need a custom dictionary for each of them. Steno is great for natural languages that evolve very slowly over time and which can be largely learnt once and then used forever. Code is a rather different beast.
- zozbot234 7y ago
- klez 7y agoNice to see someone developed a plug-in[0] for the Michela machine[1] (the one used in the Italian Parliament). The one used in the Parliament is actually just a midi keyboard, which means it can be reproduced with a relatively cheap 2-octaves off-the-shelf midi keyboard. [0] https://github.com/benoit-pierre/plover_michela https://github.com/benoit-pierre/plover_michela [1] http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/michela_stenotype_system_81845.pdf http://xahlee.info/kbd/i/michela_stenotype_system_81845.pdf
- tutanchamun 7y agoOn youtube is a person who shows how to mod [0] a cheap midi keyboard for use as a steno device and also has videos showing how the typing on the michaela-midi looks [1]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Y9jtOB7G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Y9jtOB7G0 [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfu-d93X2S4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfu-d93X2S4