Stenotype Keyboard

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steno keyboard keys

It's roughly a phonetic system. You press chords (multiple keys together) to enter a word.

Left hand types the initial consonant, right hand the ending consonant. Thumbs for vowels. All at the same time.

Steno shorthand transcript. Left side is what you type. Court Reporting How it Works How to Write on the Steno Machine Stan's Quick and Dirty: How Stenography Works

Steno with PC keyboard

This person, gives a demo of a PC keyboard steno system.

Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM

She is Mirabai Knight. One of founder the plover project, which is a open source steno system using computer keyboard.

See this list for known keyboard confirmed with using plover.

Alternative Shorthand System for Computer Keyboard?

So, steno is much faster because:

1. It's a phonetic system. You type syllables, instead of letters.
2. You press multiple keys at the same time, as piano chords.
3. The physical keyboard is designed for chords.

Is Phonetic System Faster?

A phonetic system makes typing natural language much faster. The essence, is because each “input” corresponds to multiple letters. It is a short hand system. The downside is that it's more difficult to learn. You have to memorize the short-hand system. And it also requires a translation step. (though can be done by software, automatically)

(by the way, this is a similar situation in designing a input system for Chinese. There are phonetic based system, typically requires no learning, then there's character based input system, requires a lot memorization. The character based system is much faster.)

Is Chorded Keyboard Faster?

The chord keyboard (designed for pressing multiple keys at the same time) of the steno machine, is also much advantageous.

At first, i wasn't sure about that. Let's say we have to press 3 keys on this keyboard and the normal computer keyboard. On the chorded keyboard, the order doesn't matter. Can be pressed simultaneously. This is faster than pressing each key one by one. This becomes apparent if you need to press more keys. Say, 3 keys for left hand, 2 for right. Doing that one by one, becomes a snail crawl.