[ploversteno]

It takes students in vocational steno schools six months to a year. As of now, they're our only source of hard data, because steno has been financially inaccessible to people not pursuing it as a career. My hunch is that a steno tutorial game will produce significantly quicker results than the current steno school dictation model, and that programmers (and other technical types) will likely pick up steno skills at a much faster rate than the average person currently attending a steno school.

[jodrellblank]

Based on your knowledge of English, is the phrase "pie nearing" likely to come up in conversation as often as the word "pioneering"? No? Then setting the outline "PAOI/NAOERNG" to "pioneering" is probably safe. Still, this kind of probability check needs to be done whenever defining a multisyllabic word in a steno dictionary, and the decisions are not always as clearcut as "catalogues" and "pioneering".

Really? In the days of Google, there's no clear and widely accepted answer to questions like this?

[ploversteno]

That's a particularly clear-cut example, but what about something like "my great" and "migrate"? 33 million hits for one, 37 million hits for the other. They're both pretty likely to come up, so it's important to have separate strokes for both. On the other hand, what about "mycolic" and "my colic"? Mycolic has more hits, but it's also a more specialized word; if you're not captioning in a scientific setting, you're very unlikely to hear it. On the other hand, while a phrase like "my colicky baby" appears less frequently on Google, you're more likely to encounter it in general conversation than you are a specialized word like "mycolic". So a lot of these decisions depend on the context in which you're likely to use them. They can sometimes get tricky.

[jodrellblank]

I see in the tutorials that you have bear (BAER) and bare (BAIR). Has it altered your pronunciation of words so you try to pronounce the difference? Does it cause problems when captioning people with strong accents?

[ploversteno]

Not really. When I'm in steno mode, it's like I'm speaking to myself in a different dialect, but when I'm in English mode it's all normal again. Like, this is how I would pronounce the previous sentence in steno:

When I'm n stoin mode, ts like I'm speeg to mysef nay difrt dailect, but when I'm in glish mode ts aul nol sgen.

[gnosis]

Speaking of steno schools, I've read that they have something like a 90% drop-out rate. Learning stenography is not easy.

[ploversteno]

True, sadly, but it's also unfortunately true that a lot of people in steno schools arguably shouldn't be there, because they don't have the technical or language processing skills that stenographers need to do their jobs. Virtually all those skills are possessed by coders -- especially the ones who play video games and have honed their hand-eye coordination -- so I anticipate a much better success rate among geeks than you can find among steno students, many of whom have an unrealistic idea that steno is a low-skill, well-paying clerical profession.

[Vivtek]

Izzat you, Mirabai?

[ploversteno]

Yup! Ploversteno = Mirabai Knight, cofounder of the Plover Project, professional stenographer and novice Python coder.