That looks like a great project... but does stenography still have a real place in 2025?
Speech to text is very advanced, sound recording is even cheaper, and can also record emotions... beside the (hopefully only short) inertia in the courtroom and the ability to say i know stenography, does knowing stenography have any other benefits?
I would say not really, but if someone got into split keyboards + layers and is still looking for more, steno could be worth exploring. It gave me a good excuse to learn more about phonetics, plenty of vocab for SRS apps, and much better ergonomics for spending large amounts of time on the computer daily. My right pinky shifts one key to the right and thats the furthest my hands have to move all day. Its hard to stress how little my hands have to move. Its much less work physically to enter text.
There are really good dictionaries for entering almost any keyboard shortcut you want with one hand, 100 and change symbols, basic cursor movement (moving/selecting forward/backward by char, word, line), most common emojis. Learning about the other dictionaries is a large part of what kept me digging into stenography. Its a very fun hobby that happens to combine many of my interests.
maybe it’s better now, but at last time I checked (~2 years ago) humans are still better in jargon heavy contexts - legal as you mentioned, tech/medical/etc. also accents, muffled audio, noise in general, humans are (were?) much better at accounting for that
It has plenty of benefits. Ergonomics is one. It's infinity more efficient than traditional typing.
Another is sharing a space with another person. Speech to text may be great and all...but you still have to make sounds. That's perhaps less welcome to people who work in an open office. Plus, it's hard to talk for 8-10 hours a day.
Another interesting foray into this space is the Javelin firmware, which aims to fit a steno engine directly into RP2040 powered keyboards. I appreciate Javelin's ambition but I wonder if the unusual license holds this project back. https://github.com/jthlim/javelin-steno
That looks like a great project... but does stenography still have a real place in 2025?
Speech to text is very advanced, sound recording is even cheaper, and can also record emotions... beside the (hopefully only short) inertia in the courtroom and the ability to say i know stenography, does knowing stenography have any other benefits?
I would say not really, but if someone got into split keyboards + layers and is still looking for more, steno could be worth exploring. It gave me a good excuse to learn more about phonetics, plenty of vocab for SRS apps, and much better ergonomics for spending large amounts of time on the computer daily. My right pinky shifts one key to the right and thats the furthest my hands have to move all day. Its hard to stress how little my hands have to move. Its much less work physically to enter text.
There are really good dictionaries for entering almost any keyboard shortcut you want with one hand, 100 and change symbols, basic cursor movement (moving/selecting forward/backward by char, word, line), most common emojis. Learning about the other dictionaries is a large part of what kept me digging into stenography. Its a very fun hobby that happens to combine many of my interests.
maybe it’s better now, but at last time I checked (~2 years ago) humans are still better in jargon heavy contexts - legal as you mentioned, tech/medical/etc. also accents, muffled audio, noise in general, humans are (were?) much better at accounting for that
Also: A STT algorithm can't be held accountable for any errors.
It has plenty of benefits. Ergonomics is one. It's infinity more efficient than traditional typing.
Another is sharing a space with another person. Speech to text may be great and all...but you still have to make sounds. That's perhaps less welcome to people who work in an open office. Plus, it's hard to talk for 8-10 hours a day.
Another interesting foray into this space is the Javelin firmware, which aims to fit a steno engine directly into RP2040 powered keyboards. I appreciate Javelin's ambition but I wonder if the unusual license holds this project back. https://github.com/jthlim/javelin-steno