This is a talk about Plover, the world's first Open Source steno software.
The steno machine, in its current form, was invented somewhere around 1913.
It's a phonetic-mnemonic chording system,
which means basically that everything you write
is tied to a lexicon of anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000 words --
some of which are completely phonetic words,
some of which are sort of arbitrarily determined by the stenographer.
So each stenographer has their own individual dictionary,
which can vary greatly in its content and form.
Steno is still --
even though it was originally invented in 1913 and hasn't really been improved,
except that it's now computer-compatible,
ever since the 80's --
steno is still the fastest text input method that there is.
Speech-recognition doesn't touch it.
Dvorak...
Is kind of a joke, in comparison.
Professional stenographers regularly write at speeds up to anywhere between 200 and 240 words per minute.
That's considered the mark of a good stenographer.
But the world record, as you can see,
is 360 words per minute, at 97% accuracy.
I can't do that.
But maybe some of you will, someday.
Who knows?
Just because geeks like knowing the nuts and bolts of things,
I figured I'd give you a brief intro of how it works, before I tell you why you care.
The left hand handles the initial consonants of each syllable.
The right hand handles the ending consonants of each syllable.
And the thumbs handle the vowels.
So, for example, if you wanted to write the word "gauge,"
you do the chord that makes up G on the left hand,
the chord that makes up the J sound -- because it's not orthographic; it's phonetic --
on the right hand.
And then the long A sound,
which is a chord made up of several vowels with the thumbs.
So together you get TKPW: G,
AEU: A,
and PBLG: J.
Put it together, you get "gauge."
It's pretty simple.
And you can, like I said -- you have many of these strictly phonetic words
that just are written exactly as they sound in English,
and then you have many, many more words, phrases, combinations of words
that are determined by the stenographer,
out of their own head.
So why do we need Open Source steno?
Steno has been a locked-up industry since the beginning,
but especially since the advent of computer-compatible steno machines.
You know, there's a single company with a stranglehold on the market.
There are a handful of other companies.
And they all just charge egregious prices for bloated software
that breaks all the time and has horrible DRM
and is completely inaccessible to people
who aren't professional stenographers.
Yes?
>> Do they only run on Windows, by any chance?
Yes, indeed.
Well, I think some people have got it running using, like, Windows Bootcamp or whatever, within Macs.
But certainly there's no proprietary steno software that runs on Linux.
I think some of it still runs on DOS, if that helps!
I still know some working stenographers who run DOS software.
But yeah.
It's a hidebound system.
It's locked in.
It's expensive as hell.
And that's why no one uses this incredible technology for anything except making a living,
which is a real shame.
So I discovered...
Well, I wanted to do Open Source steno for a long time,
because I was so frustrated with my software,
and because we're a shrinking industry,
and I want to bring more people into the field.
And because it's cool, and I like geeking out about it.
But when I realized that Microsoft was making a gaming keyboard
that had full n-key rollover, and priced at $45,
I realized that's basically a steno machine.
You know?
A really, really cheap, easily available steno machine.
Yeah?
>> What is n-key rollover?
Oh, sorry.
N-key rollover means that every keystroke is registered when pressed on the qwerty keyboard,
even if it's several keystrokes at a time.
So, you know, most keyboards, the typical keyboards --
anywhere more than three or four keys pressed at a time,
some of those aren't going to register.
But the specialty gaming keyboards make sure that everything you press registers,
which means that you can type steno chords of up to 22 keys at a time,
and they're all captured and noted.
So...
Yeah.
Steno software, $4,000.
Plover, totally free.
Plover, $45 keyboard.
And now I have to convince you guys that you actually care.
Oh, sorry.
Just really briefly I'll tell you how Plover got rolling.
Josh Lifton was working at a co-op in Brooklyn.
He's a freelance Python programmer.
I'm a freelance stenographer.
We both rented office space, and I told him that I needed a tutor, a Python tutor.
Because I originally wanted to write this on my own,
having very little Python knowledge whatsoever.
But I posted something in the elevator.
We got in touch.
And at first he started off giving me lessons,
and then as he got more excited about the project,
he started donating a lot of his time.
I mean, I paid him as much as I could.
I've put about $3,000 into Plover out of my own pocket.
But he's also donated countless hours of programming time
to get it where it is right now.
And he's kind of as hooked on steno as I am now.
So it's Open Source in the sense that all the code is online.
But it's not really community-developed at this point.
He's basically the only one who's contributed a significant amount of code.
But we hope that that will change.
Okay.
Why do you care?
You coders, with your katanas and your VR glasses in your virtual reality parlors.
You know?
What possible connection would you have with this sweet, smiling, middle-aged lady
in the courtroom with the paper hanging out of her steno machine?
You know, why...
There's nothing cyberpunk about steno.
I mean, it's barely even steampunk.
It's basically...
A lot of people consider it, you know...
Clerical, obsolete office equipment, right?
Sometimes I tell people, "I can write 240 words a minute!"
And they're like, "I only think at, like, 80, tops."
And I'm like, "Yeah, I don't think that's necessarily true."
This is an abstract of a six-part series that I've written on the Plover blog.
Six essays dealing with what steno is actually useful for.
I won't go through all of them in detail, because some of them are probably
more relevant to you than others.
But just to give a quick rundown of each one.
Now, you can see speed is basically at the bottom.
I tried to list these in order of priority for programmers.
Speed isn't the most important thing, you know?
It's useful for bragging rights.
For winning online typing games.
You know, it can be very useful in some specific circumstances.
But primarily what I think steno would be very useful for,
for programmers, is the fluency that it lends to thought when composing text.
Because you're thinking in discrete chunks.
You're generally thinking in words.
Or in, you know, commands with various syntax attached.
But they're usually, in your mind, probably reflected syllabically.
You're saying them to yourself in your head.
You're not spelling out every letter as you think of them.
When you're writing this stuff in qwerty,
you have to translate every letter into a finger action.
You know?
Which then you have to duplicate correctly on the keyboard.
Your fingers fall all over themselves,
you have to slow down,
the error correction has to happen once per letter instead of once per word.
It's far too granular, you know?
With steno, you're thinking in discrete words,
and you're writing those words as you think them.
And I have not used Plover for programming,
because, like I said, I'm still a novice.
But I...
Do any of you know NaNoWriMo?
The National Novel Writing Month, where you have to write a novel of 50,000 words in 30 days?
I did that a couple of times.
I did it once qwerty-style.
And once steno-style.
The qwerty was pure torture, because I was second-guessing myself at every word.
The steno just, like, flew out of my fingers.
It wasn't a good novel, but it was so easy to write, because it just...
You know, by the time my thoughts came out of my mind, they were already on the screen.
I didn't have to spend that buffer zone tip-tapping them out.
And I'm a fast qwerty typist.
I can type around 100 words per minute.
But I think people who think
that they don't think faster than that
don't realize how much their fingers are slowing them down.
Yes?
>> Have you spoken to any coders, or do you know any coders that are actually using steno now?
No, the most advance interest that I've gotten does seem to be from coders.
I think probably because Plover is Linux-only at this point,
and so it's mostly tech geeks who are able to use it.
I don't think there's anyone
actually using it for coding right now.
But I know of a couple people teaching themselves steno,
in order to use it to code eventually, so...
>>I guess maybe the closest analogy I might be able to make is that if you're captioning
a physics or statistics class, it's very punctuation-heavy.
Right, yeah.
Steno's great at punctuation.
>> So is it something where you basically just end up creating your own macros around programming constructs?
That is what steno is all about.
We call them defining entries in our dictionary.
But it's very easy to do, and very useful.
So I've been doing Python the Hard Way through CodeLesson online,
and this is one of our exercises we had to do.
A Zork-style text adventure.
So I took a chunk of the code that I wrote and totaled up the keystrokes.
I actually did write it on a qwerty laptop.
So I totaled up the keystrokes that it took me to write on the qwerty laptop.
222.
Then I counted as if I had done it in steno.
I got 119, but that's only assuming that I defined spawn_creche, that variable,
as a single-stroke entry.
So every time you reference it after that,
you can just write it in one stroke.
And the same thing with infinite_library.
If I'd thought that I was only gonna use those variables once or twice, I would have just written them out letter by letter.
And so then it would have only been 102 keystrokes,
rather than 119.
So you can see there is a really drastic increase in efficiency.
Both ergonomically, as I'll address later,
but also in terms of the number of potential errors you'll make, how far ahead of yourself you are
when you start discovering those errors,
and have to backspace back to fix them.
And in just...
When you think print, it comes out as "print";
it doesn't come out as P-R-I-N-T.
It's hard to explain how much of a difference this makes until you use it.
But I would advise everyone, if you're interested,
to give it a try and to see how it works out.
So the other thing...
Let's see -- how much time do I have left?
A fair amount.
So I can go through a few of these.
Mobile computing is, of course,
every cyberpunk fan's dream.
I was a science fiction nerd.
I'm still a science fiction nerd.
And I would desperately love to be able to walk around and write down all my thoughts silently,
and, you know, have my glasses, and...
Honestly, the biggest barrier here is that there is no commercially available
heads-up display for mobile computing.
But once there is, steno is definitely the way to go with that.
Because can you imagine putting a qwerty keyboard, like,
in a wearable-style keyboard that you're walking around with, with 112 letters or something?
I mean, it's just ridiculous.
You know, the great thing about steno is it's designed for the human hand.
It's only got 22 keys, and they're in columns.
And not staggered columns.
They're in nice aligned columns.
So the footprint is basically the size of your hand.
Any surface you can write on that you can put your hands on, you can steno on.
You know?
So I think there's a huge potential in mobile computing, once that gets going.
It's geeky, but in certain situations, very useful.
And pretty cool.
Accessibility.
Now this -- I'll talk about what I do professionally very briefly in the last entry point.
And that's transcribing for the Deaf and hard of hearing.
But when I talk about accessibility here,
I'm mainly talking about text-to-speech,
as opposed to speech-to-text.
There are a lot of people with speech disabilities.
Roger Ebert, who had to have his jaw removed because of cancer.
There's a kid in Ireland who was born without a lower jaw.
There are many people with various autistic spectrum conditions, you know,
who don't speak verbally, but are very fluent in text.
And, of course, people with hearing loss don't always use their voices to speak,
but are perfectly able to converse at speed in text.
Qwerty slows down their communication.
It's very labor-intensive.
It prevents, you know, easy back and forth conversations.
Steno is the only technology that allows you to write as quickly as everyone else speaks,
which means that if someone with a speech disability learns steno, they're able to basically converse with everyone
as much as they want,
on par with everyone else, speed-wise.
And, conversely, the more geeks learn steno,
the more Hearing geeks are able to converse with Deaf geeks.
If they don't necessarily know Sign Language,
they can all speak in the common language of English text.
So there are a lot of potentials there.
Ergonomics.
I think a big deal for a lot of people who work with text for a living.
RSIs are no joke.
And the individual finger motions of qwerty typing is very stressful on the muscles and tendons.
Each finger basically has to depress each key.
And you're constantly wiggling your fingers.
There's not much call for rest.
The motions that you use when writing steno...
First of all, the force comes from the forearm rather than the fingers.
Second of all, you're writing many fewer strokes per minute.
You know, this rate of speed is around 200 words per minute.
Moving your fingers like this.
In qwerty, you have to go like that for just 100.
It's also...
Because of the small footprint, you're able to use different configurations.
This is an ergonomic machine that I find very useful.
I had developing RSIs several years ago,
before I started steno.
And since I got this machine,
they've pretty much gone away,
which is really good for what I do.
I know a lot of programmers face that problem as well.
>> Wait, you had what?
Oh, I'm sorry -- repetitive stress injuries.
Yes, sorry.
RSIs.
Any typist has the potential to develop these,
and they can be really career-killing conditions.
And it's also just so much less effort, you know?
I can sit back and write for seven hours at 180 words per minute, and not break a sweat.
You know, whenever I try to keep up with qwerty,
and I'm typing 100 words a minute, by the end of it, I'm just... I'm wiped out.
It's really exhausting.
You wouldn't think, but it is.
Pure speed I already addressed.
It's just bragging rights, basically.
And then professional stenography,
which is honestly the main reason why I'm putting my own money and effort into developing this.
I'm reaching out to you guys, because you're all geeks,
and you probably won't become professional stenographers.
But you might become the ones to give steno cachet.
You know, you might start using it.
Make other people aware of it.
People will start playing the video games that you guys use to burn off stress.
Or to develop the steno skills that you will then later use for coding purposes.
And some people will realize that they actually really love doing this.
I love it.
My job --
I make about six figures a year.
I'm my own boss.
I sit in college classes and transcribe lectures all day in so many different subjects.
You know, from pharmacy to medical school, tax law, art school, you name it.
It's paradise.
And I get to, like, help people get an education.
There are so few of us in this city that I've been killing myself
trying to find coverage for the demand this semester.
And if I don't get more people into our profession, it's going to wither up and die.
And a lot of people who need what I do won't be able to get what they need.
So I'm hoping that by bringing steno first to the subculture,
and eventually to the mainstream,
I'll build a group of amateurs,
some of whom will be interested enough
and committed enough
to want to develop their skills and make it into a profession.
So if you know anyone who might be interested in doing what I do,
contact me after the lecture,
because I would definitely love to speak to them.
Okay, so here's my master plan for making this happen.
Plover currently exists.
It's pretty good.
It's Linux-only.
It's intended to be a keyboard emulator.
You know, as opposed to all of the existing proprietary software out there,
which are all, like, these giant word processors that are focused on providing printed transcripts,
and have very rudimentary control over the OS.
Plover is designed to have complete control over the OS.
So you can use it for anything you can use your qwerty keyboard to do.
It still needs just-in-time dictionary entries to be really, really useful.
But other than that, it's pretty much working quite well.
A couple of little bugs.
But very few people -- as, you know, you asked me -- who actually uses Plover?
Not that many people use Plover on a regular basis.
I use it for transcribing on the train, because I don't like carrying my big steno machine --
you know, taking it out on the train and transcribing stuff.
So I can just use this little keyboard, which is much easier.
So I use it occasionally.
It's also my backup machine in case this one breaks,
which it has.
And I know of a couple people who started out learning steno from Plover
and then eventually got hooked and wound up buying
proprietary software and proprietary hardware,
because they decided to become professional stenographers.
Which is cool.
I like being a gateway drug to professional stenography.
But I would much rather get people actually using Plover,
make it useful enough that they can actually use it,
rather than having to downgrade to these $4000 systems.
How did that happen?
Okay.
Hover Plover is my way that I think I can get people into it.
It's going to be a suite of little minigames.
How many of you guys have played typing games?
Yeah, exactly.
And they're fun, right?
They're actually even more fun with steno, because they're slightly more complex.
You're not just doing the little home row tippy-tappy.
You know, it's...
You have to bring in these dictionary entry incorporations,
defining your arbitrary mnemonic briefs.
And, you know, you're stroking out whole words.
So you can do something like a Guitar Hero-style thing,
but you're actually writing all of the lyrics to the songs you're listening to.
You know, in one stroke.
It's really fun.
It's actually a hypnotic kind of thing.
Once you get into the groove, and you're writing everything you hear,
and it's coming out through your fingers and onto the screen.
It's a very pleasant sensation.
So I've got a couple of ideas for the minigames
that we can use as part of the tutorial to teach people steno in the most painless way possible.
Because right now...
Oh, man.
I went to court reporting school.
Because there is no school to teach you how to provide realtime for the deaf.
There's only court reporting.
And then you have to sort of teach yourself the realtime side of the business.
And it's sitting in a room for three hours,
while someone reads you jury charges, basically.
Like, legal material, you know.
And they start out at 60 words a minute.
And then once you pass that test, you go to 80 words a minute.
And it's tedious and it's grueling.
And it costs, like, 300 bucks a month.
And there's an 85% dropout rate in steno schools.
It's kind of a scam.
They're all for-profit schools.
It's a bad scene.
I think getting people to actually use this while having a good time
and getting, like, competitive about showing up on the high score tables
is the way to really get a solid user base of steno users.
So I'm just going to give you a couple screenshots.
Like, mockups, obviously.
Hover Plover does not yet exist,
because, sadly, I'm kind of tapped out on funding for Plover.
I'm looking for alternate sources.
And Hover Plover hasn't really...
I commissioned a couple of screenshots to see what the minigames might look like,
but until I get some development money,
Hover Plover will not exist yet.
But here's what I'm hoping it'll look like when it does exist.
So that's the Plovercraft, right?
And your Plovercraft is busted.
It can only go up.
You know, and it can't navigate around obstacles.
So you're...
It's a 2D side-scrolling platformer.
So you have to navigate around all these obstacles by pressing the word,
by typing the word, so it'll like zoom you up above the obstacle.
And then you'll start dropping back down again,
to try to get to the repair shop to fix your Plovercraft.
So the word "compression" in steno is spelled K-P-R-E-G-S.
The GS is the "shun" ending and the KP is sort of "k'puh."
It's semi-phonetic.
There's lots of little shortcut tricks, you know?
So you type that, and your Plovercraft zooms up.
And, you know, you have to navigate around the stray cats
and water towers and whatever else.
I think it'll be awesome.
The other mini game that I've got an idea for...
(laughter)
Yeah, so this is a...
This is a top-down space shooter, basically.
So you've got your little simple one-stroke words,
like "snails" and "antidisestablishmentarianism."
Easy peasy, right?
Then you've got your slightly more challenging two-stroke words like "guardian".
Slightly more challenging.
"Bemusement"; three-stroke.
And then you got something like this.
This giant scary laser ship, which is an undefined.
So it's a word that doesn't appear in your dictionary.
And you gotta figure out quickly
what you want to define it as, define it,
and then it goes down to these little, you know, depending on how many strokes it is,
it'll go down to that stroke.
So "frangipani" -- probably a three-stroke word.
Not too scary.
As long as you can define it in time, you have no problem.
And you've gotten 107 defines already,
so you're gonna be fine.
That is basically...
Sorry, that cut off.
That's basically my talk.
I'm very happy to answer any questions
that you guys might have.
But if you're interested, or know someone else who might be interested,
I really --
I need some kind of a buttkick to get this going again.
It's been on hiatus for about six months, ever since I ran out of money,
and Josh had a baby and moved to the west coast.
So I'd love any ideas on raising capital.
Or if you know of anyone who might want to use the software.
Or if you guys are interested in using the software, please let me know.
Email me.
Comment on the blog.
I'll probably be posting these slides on the blog.
And the Google group is cut off down there, but it's linked on the blog.
So that's pretty much it.
Thank you.
(applause)
Any questions?
>> You just need funding for the game?
Yeah, and, like, a little more work on Plover.
Like, this one feature needs to be developed.
>> Have you thought about maybe getting in touch with one of the Python start-up groups,
or doing a workshop to introduce people to programming,
and getting them up to speed?
Because maybe they can take on one of the games as a project.
Well, at this point I'm still sort of trying to gauge demand, because I get a lot of different responses.
I mean, you guys obviously cared enough to come to the presentation.
How many of you think that learning Plover might be a fun and/or useful thing to do at some point?
So, like, most of you.
That's encouraging.
I know there's some selection bias, because you came to this talk.
But it also proves that I didn't totally turn you off the idea, and so...
Yeah?
>> So I was curious why it was Linux-only,
and you say it's a keyboard emulator, but I'm wondering --
what is the code base written in?
Could it be Python libraries or some sort of HTML5, so you could use it anywhere?
And could it go on GitHub?
Okay, we started on GitHub and then moved to Launchpad.
But the reason why it's currently Linux-only is because the code for the keyboard emulation
is taken from xkey, which I think was written in Python.
So it was pretty easy to incorporate it into the rest of Plover's Python code.
The equivalent to xkey in Windows is AutoHotKey, which is written in C.
So I think it will be a more complex job to sort of mash those two together and make them work.
So that's basically it.
I would definitely like to port to Windows, because I think that would open it up a lot.
But it's going to take a little more development effort to do that.
Yeah?
>> Do you think there's a lot of demand at most any university to have someone caption lectures?
Well, there certainly is in New York City.
Like I said, I've had to turn down five or six students this semester,
which is terrible, because it means that these people are basically not getting a education.
Dental school, medical school...
These are people who have worked their entire lives to get where they are,
and now they're trying to go to school without any accommodations,
because the people just aren't on the ground.
It's a terrible state of affairs.
So not all universities are willing to pay for accommodations,
because, you know, it is a difficult skill to learn, and it's expensive to hire someone like me.
But some schools definitely are, so there's a huge demand.
Yeah?
>>> My wife goes to dental school, and there's one student who listens to lectures,
as well as type at the same time.
Creates a transcript, and he obviously sells on the portal.
Yeah.
But he just types, like, qwerty-style?
>> Um, I'm not sure how he...
But yes, those transcripts are available.
So the question from my wife was: How can he pay attention to the class, as well as type it?
He just types, and when he goes home, he reads, and if he has a question, he goes to the professor.
The good thing is: Many students, they don't attend the lecture, or partial lecture, it's kind of helpful to read.
They have recordings, but not all professors have recordings.
If they want to get a recording, they need to have a TA, and they need to pay the TA, and it's kind of expensive.
And also searchable text is much more useful for studying purposes than a long, linear sound file.
But -- so, first of all, to address that, he's probably not getting everything verbatim,
obviously, if he's just doing qwerty.
Although some typists are pretty good.
They can get about half of the salient details.
Second of all, I learn a hell of a lot when I'm transcribing.
You know, it goes in through my ears and out through my fingers, but it leaves something behind.
So, I think it's actually a pretty good...
I know of at least one person who taught himself steno while going to school.
Like, pre-pharmacy school.
And got really good grades.
But then decided he would rather be a stenographer than a pharmacist.
So now he's getting into doing what I do,
and working for Deaf and hard of hearing college students.
>> Is there a clearinghouse site anywhere for captioning and steno jobs?
No, it's mostly independent contractors.
It's a very fractured field.
>> So basically, if you were looking for work, there isn't a place you would go, other than to agencies?
I just send my resume out to all 26 universities in the New York City area,
and they come to me.
Did you have a question?
>> About the library, so...
Is she using steno right now?
Yeah, she's using proprietary software.
>> But you were saying you had to declare some variables.
And that stenographers have their own library, and stuff like that -- how does that part tie in?
So you just tell it -- this is how I would spell compression,
and there's a way you can add this stuff
while you're doing it?
Yeah, well, this is the one feature that Plover is currently missing that it really needs to have
in order to be very useful.
I was assuming in that Zork thing --
that it had already been implemented, yeah.
>> So the feature that Plover needs is the ability to add in your own new entries?
Exactly; from the writer.
I mean, you can do it --
you can edit the text file manually, you know.
But being able to do it without breaking the stream of text is very useful,
and I do all the time in my proprietary software.
>> So you just shift into a mode?
Uh-huh, yeah.
>> So how long would it take for the average beginner to reach 200 words per minute with steno?
200 is tricky.
I find most people get up to around 100 or 120 within four to six months,
and then they usually hit a wall and then plateau for a while.
And so once you hit your first big plateau, it's tough to get above that.
I got from 0 to 225 in a year and a half.
And that was me probably in front of the machine about 60 hours a week,
because I was doing it at my day job, and I was also practicing on my own time.
But most people can probably get up to 120-140 within, you know, three to six months.
And if Hover Plover is addictive enough,
addictive enough that it gets people, you know, spending all night doing this --
which it really can.
I know people who do just regular steno for hours,
and they get sucked into this steno hole, and it's really engrossing.
You know, if it's addictive enough and people are spending a lot of time on it,
their rates will go up really quickly.
Yeah?
>> Can you give me the details on adding a word on the fly like that?
I'll tell you how my proprietary software does it.
I invoke a macro on my steno machine, which is GLBL, short for "global this word."
It pops up a window, which is, like, big and in the middle of the screen and obnoxious,
unless I make it invisible.
Plover will have a simple, discrete one-line window in the taskbar.
But my proprietary software -- it's a huge, giant, unsightly thing.
Anyway, I press GLBL, a window pops up,
and it gives me the opportunity to tap out the word that I want letter by letter in English,
and then to enter the steno strokes that correspond to it.
So it just maps that, puts it in the dictionary,
and then every time you enter the steno strokes, it comes out with the English.
>> So this window pops up, you do that, you're done with that, you close the window,
and it injects that new word into your stream, and you're back to going along --
Exactly.
>> And so I'm thinking about keyboard shortcuts and how often there's conflicts.
So, in steno, how well are you able to go, "Well, this is the new keystroke,"
and not have it hit, like, a bazillion possibilities?
That's a really good point, actually.
Thank you for bringing that up, because I hadn't mentioned it.
I'm a Vim user.
You know, and so you've got, in Vim, every key mapped to a command.
A bit of a learning curve.
But once you learn it, it's very useful.
And there's some, you know, slight mnemonic things involved.
Like B takes you back.
F finds stuff.
Whatever.
Steno, first of all, is much more mnemonic,
because it's tied to syllables, rather than to initial letters.
So you're able to remember many more different commands.
And the question of conflicts --
they're usually pretty easy to avoid if you make them sound like an English word,
but they're not actually an English word.
You know, so my brief for "ridiculous" is "RILGS."
You know, to the point where I sometimes say it in English.
Like, "Dude, that's totally rilgs."
(laughter)
Or, like, the brief for "necessarily" is "NELS."
You know, it's pronounceable.
It's very memorable.
But it doesn't conflict with anything in English, because it's not a valid English syllable.
So for command strokes, it's, you know, pretty simple to come up with something
that's very easy to remember, very easy to write, but has...
You have many, many more options.
You know, with Vim, you just have basically the qwerty keyboard; that's 112 possible commands.
For steno, you can have innumerable commands, because they're tied to syllables rather than to letters.
>> Do you have punctuation on your keyboard, like curly braces and things like that?
Oh, yeah, totally.
I don't know if any of you guys saw me caption any of the talks.
I didn't put any underscores when they appeared,
because even though I told my proprietary steno software to define "RUND" as underscore,
it decided it didn't want to do that.
So it just didn't just happen.
Sorry about that.
My software, $4,000 software.
>> Didn't work, huh?
Are you kidding me?
They don't even have Word Wrap on this thing.
Seriously, we had to set the margins, like, really kind of bigger than we wanted to,
because otherwise it would just start scrolling off the screen.
It's pathetic.
And I have to pay $700 a year just to get the upgrades.
>> Are you actually using Plover at all, or is it still --
Yeah, as I said, I have it as a backup in case my proprietary stuff goes down.
And I do occasionally use it when doing offline transcription for medical journals,
because it's easier to take out the qwerty keyboard than to take this thing out.
Um, yeah?
>> Can you remap your qwerty keyboard into chords?
You don't have to remap it.
When Plover's turned on, it just sends out steno,
and when you turn it off, it just goes back to qwerty.
The only modification I made was I put a couple of leather keypads
on the keys used for steno, just for some haptic feedback.
It's very simple.
If anyone wants to come up and try it out...
Well, I think I probably have to go to the next lecture to caption.
But thank you so much for coming.
And if you have any questions, please contact me, and I'd love to talk to y'all.
Bye.