I'm certified at 260 words per minute, but even so Jonathan Coulton's "I Feel Fantastic" was too much for me. I only got 77% accuracy. Can you do better?
Download the 4-song demo of Steno Hero at http://stenoarcade.com or via Steam. Works with any steno machine or qwerty keyboard.
Each finger can press up to two keys at a time (top row, bottom row, or both rows together). Right pinky can press up to four at a time (two rows plus two columns), and right index can press up to three at a time (two rows plus asterisk column).
Weird. You're right; it doesn't work. Must have something to do with the layer Plover's using for keyboard output. That's frustrating. I'll bring it up with the developers.
It would be cool to see a video demonstrating this using the same snippet of code! If you decide to make one, let me know, and I'll link it on the Plover blog.
You really need a minimum of 16-key rollover to do steno properly. Otherwise you're just really constrained in the number of chords you're able to write.
I've thought about having a sort of collaborative dictionary, updated in realtime with entries weighted by how frequently people use them over a certain period of time. I'm not sure how practical it would actually turn out to be, but it's an interesting idea.
The Android app is actually pretty decent; you use it Swype-style, but rather than employing Swype's predictive method, it's 100% deterministic, so you know what you're going to get every time.
Yeah, one of the things I love about steno (as opposed to predictive systems like voice recognition or autocorrect) is its 100% determinism. That tiny pause of hesitation to wait and see whether a word has come out properly is so completely disruptive of flow for me. In the most recent video, I basically did the whole thing just keeping my eyes on the text I was transcribing from, rather than watching my output. You can see me correcting a few errors, but that's because my fingers told me that I'd made one, which prompted me to look over and figure out what I'd screwed up. Otherwise I could trust that whenever I hit a stroke, it translated as the exact same thing every time, so I never have to keep hovering over my text watching for errors. It makes the whole process way more pleasurable.
But yeah, making a comprehensive steno tutorial video game is pretty much at the top of our list right now. We've even got some funding set aside for art assets and stuff; it's just about finding the right developers at this point.
I'm in talks with a small NYC private school to possibly start some middle schoolers on an informal course in steno. We'll see if they take to it. I'm hoping it'll be like ducks to water. Stay tuned!
I'm still just a Python novice, so obviously I didn't write this code originally; I'm just transcribing it from a text file into Vim to demonstrate how easily and fluently code can be written with steno. It's not primarily about speed, but about chunking commands and words into single strokes, as opposed to breaking them down into individual letters and typing each letter out one by one as in qwerty. Also notice how simple error correction is; an incorrect word is deleted with a single stroke.
Not really. When I'm in steno mode, it's like I'm speaking to myself in a different dialect, but when I'm in English mode it's all normal again. Like, this is how I would pronounce the previous sentence in steno:
When I'm n stoin mode, ts like I'm speeg to mysef nay difrt dailect, but when I'm in glish mode ts aul nol sgen.
That's a particularly clear-cut example, but what about something like "my great" and "migrate"? 33 million hits for one, 37 million hits for the other. They're both pretty likely to come up, so it's important to have separate strokes for both. On the other hand, what about "mycolic" and "my colic"? Mycolic has more hits, but it's also a more specialized word; if you're not captioning in a scientific setting, you're very unlikely to hear it. On the other hand, while a phrase like "my colicky baby" appears less frequently on Google, you're more likely to encounter it in general conversation than you are a specialized word like "mycolic". So a lot of these decisions depend on the context in which you're likely to use them. They can sometimes get tricky.
Download the 4-song demo of Steno Hero at http://stenoarcade.com or via Steam. Works with any steno machine or qwerty keyboard.