not_your_vase 21 hours ago

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?

  • toomanyreps 10 hours ago

    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.

  • skribanto 12 hours ago

    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

    • pipifax 10 hours ago

      Also: A STT algorithm can't be held accountable for any errors.

  • spit2wind 6 hours ago

    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.