Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM

109K views · 13 years ago · talk · intermediate · evergreen

Mirabai Knight, a stenographer and programmer, presents Plover at PyCon 2013, an open-source stenography engine that lets a steno machine or keyboard type at court-reporter speeds. She ends with a live demo of coding with it.

HN likes it as the practical case for chorded steno input as a faster and less strain-prone alternative to typing, including for programmers.

“programming at the speed of thought; vim at 240 wpm”

22 comments from Hacker News

j
@jarmitage2021 · in “Plover is a free, open-source stenography engine”
Mirabai Knight's talk about this is one of my all time faves: ▶ this video Inspired me to try to create a live coding musical instrument based on it: link / link
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z
@zeta01342023 · in “Semaphore: A Full-Body Keyboard”
Yes! Here is a really great talk on the state of doing so, with a fantastic realtime demo near the end. Mirabai live-codes using her Plover setup and narrates her thought process as she types out each command. ▶ this video
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@melling2023 · in “Plover: free, open-source stenography engine”
Over the past decade there have been some interesting discussions about Plover on HN link The video in the first result was good: ▶ this video
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J
@JZL0032021 · in “Ask HN: Any good text-to-speech solutions for someone who cannot talk normally?”
I personally like ibm tts slightly more than Google although it is more expensive. I think Google, but definitely other startups also allow you to train the model to be closer to your voice. Since you might have many recordings of yourself before this, could be cool. Comment if you can't find it and I can look It's none of my business how long term it is, but if it is long term look into stenography, especially open source opensteno and plover. Old talk but ▶ this video It's what court reporters use to transcribe at the speed of text but for you it could mean giving text into a tts software at the speed of normal talking. I've only tried it briefly but if you take the time to learn it, you can comfortably get to normal speech speeds with no hang fatigue. It's one of the reasons opensteno is so nice bc it also has cheap steno keyboards which are normally thousands and locked behind industry. Comment if you want more links! I can add when I'm by my computer
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@linsomniac2020 · in “Workman Keyboard Layout (2010)”
Here's a good PyCon presentation from someone who switched to voice input for programming. ▶ this video I hadn't thought about it until this thread, but one of the biggest barriers for me using it was that we have a really quiet open office, but now that we are WFH...
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@iLemming2020 · in “Taika Waititi Calls Out Apple's MacBook Keyboard Backstage at the Oscars”
> I imagine writers have it even worse than programmers. Well, I dunno about that. One of the major projects I'm currently working with, has over 130K lines of Clojure (tests excluded), and that is not too big of a project. I'm too lazy to figure out the proper way to count "words" in that project `wc` shows over 5M. In comparison - "War and Peace" [technically] is ten times smaller. Programmers do type a lot. Possibly, way more than writers have to. And that's just code. Have you ever thought about how much typing happens outside of coding? When reviewing PRs, replying to emails, etc. That is why every single programmer must invest into choosing the right keyboard; learning how to maintain a proper posture; maybe learn non-traditional ways to input text - Vim and Emacs keybindings; try Stenographic input¹; Speech recognition², etc. Because when they don't - sooner or later they end up having problems: back and neck pain, headaches, RSI, hemorrhoids. --- ¹ ▶ this video ² link
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@gcr2016 · in “Ask HN: How did you keep improving your typing speed after 100 WPM?”
Court reporters are required to type at 240WPM with zero mistakes, or they lose their court reporting license. You can teach yourself to use a stenography machine. You can build your own steno machine with some open-source software and a fancy gaming keyboard. See this video by Mirabai Knight and the Plover project: ▶ this video I wanted to try this but I couldn't stick with it.
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r
@reledi2014 · in “Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM (2013) [video]”
I never knew something like this was possible, very cool. One (unrelated) part of the Q&A saddens me, the fallacy that an open source project cannot be commercially successful: ▶ this video
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@fsiefken2014 · in “Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM (2013) [video]”
programming at the speed of thought; vim at 240 wpm ▶ this video I wonder any of the Pycon 2013 participants try to learn plover and what their experiences were, perhaps they even read this topic on HN? I'm already very proficient at dvorak typing (with the regular vim bindings), so I'm not sure if the 30% speed increase would justify taking 3 to 6 months of learning this, it'd be cool for substituting your speech with a text to speech engine, and with openeeg recognition one step closer to cyborghood. It's also nice to just have the skill to transcribe human speech real time and being able to apply for jobs in politics, justice or television. For example, here's an interview with the dutch transcriber in Dutch parliament: link I wonder if the steno chording could be optimized significantly by rearranging the keys and layout in a similar way as dvorak did with qwerty. Perhaps T9/autoexpand with Linux can be just as fast, but it cannot be used blind, can it? link link
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z
@zaroth2014 · in “Plover: Thought to Text at 240 WPM (2013) [video]”
Submitted the video to Hacker News.
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@vanderZwan2014 · in “One year with Colemak”
Stenography might also be an option: link Here's a video by the stenographer half of the duo that started the project: ▶ this video
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3
@3rd32014 · in “DataHand”
There is an open source stenography project called "Plover". The idea of stenotype is instead of typing individual letters one combines keys to form sillables (or commands), what makes typing blazingly fast (240 WPM in the video below) and is overall a less cramped movement, because after each sillable you can relax instead of keeping muscles tensed for each letter. link Talk: ▶ this video Demo: link
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