[samatman]

Stenography is specifically excluded, because it's a shorthand: the actual form of the final text is reconstituted from abbreviation.

The system described in the OP text is a form of stenography, conducted with a normal keyboard. I would be surprised if a competition typist, presented with an already-shortened text, couldn't beat out most stenotype stenographers working off the original text.

It would be unfair for a typing competition to exclude a chorded keypad, and I don't know of they do or not. It's completely fair to not accept "ts cmptly fr" as the transcription of "it's completely fair", no matter how it's typed in.

[taeric]

In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand.

That all said, I confess I don't buy many of the benefits of alternative keyboards. I switched to colemak about a year ago and I think I am still below the speed I was at qwerty. Significantly so.

Of course, I don't know that this has had a major impact on my speed of getting things done. Plenty of other obstacles there.

[samatman]

> In the context of the article we are reading, this seems somewhat amusing. The entire trick, as presented, turns typing into an adhoc shorthand.

Yes, and I in fact said the same thing in the post you're replying to.

Typing competitions have existed for far longer than personal computers, and the value of typing fast was being able to produce a complete typewritten document. Steno machines coexisted, and had their own competitions, so the parameters of these things were set before it became possible to 'reconstitute' stenography into full text on an automatic basis.

All games have rules, and they're always somewhat-to-completely arbitrary. An "open category" would reduce to whomever can talk fastest, since text transcription is a basically solved problem and the sound sample can be slowed until it's in the pocket for the transcribing software to work on it. Steve Woodmore can articulate 637 words per minute: no one is touching that with their fingers.

[taeric]

Agreed, I didn't mean my last post to be a rebuttal of yours. Just more conversation in it. :) (Is why I called it amusing.)

I get that most forum posts are point counterpoint things. That said, it isn't the only way, is it?

I'm curious how true it is that text transcription is solved. Judging from how badly my home speakers with at times, I'm sceptical. This is especially true in most environments with many people talking. Just getting a "stop" in while my kids are in the room is already difficult.

Edit: I see my mistake. I should have said "it is indeed an adhoc shorthand". I did not mean to make it like I was introducing the point.

[samatman]

No worries, yes that would have been much clearer.

'solved' in that, when I say something complex to my phone, it does get it right, although there is a problem of the long tail of proper nouns: I live in Hawaii, and it has real problems with the place names around here, can't pronounce them either. I'd say it's well past 99% and will only improve: it correctly handled the sentence "voice transcription is approximately as robust as stenography", which doesn't make the sentence true but is suggestive.

I guess my point was that it's easy to recognize that voice transcription is 'not typing', and stenography just isn't typing in the same way: there's software between the actual transcript and the final, legible text, which lets it be faster.

Steno would be pretty useless for me as a coder, though I do use snippets, which are kind of the same thing if you squint.