-
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.
