She Can Type Faster Than You: Here's How! | Matt Gray is Trying: Stenography

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This was like learning a new language, and a new musical instrument, all while semi-blindfolded!
Matt Gray | mattg.co.uk | @MattGrayYes
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Series Producer/Director: Cambria Bailey-Jones
Producer: Jacob Trueman
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A Matt Gray & Penny4 Production www.penny4.co.uk
Special thanks to
Mary Sorene | sorene.co.uk/
Leah Willersdorf | / steno_princess
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Hi, I'm Matt Gray. You may know me from my work with Tom Scott, The Technical Difficulties, or even as a broadcast engineer working in radio.

[@MattGrayYES]

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[@ragnkja]

To those of us who use closed captioning regularly, it’s quite clear that AI isn’t up to the task yet, because it tends to fail right when we need the captions the most: ambiguous words and jargon.

[@petergerdes1094]

I suspect that is more a function of economics than capability. You need more processing power to run bigger models and much more data to train a more accurate model and, currently, that doesn't make economic sense.

[@UntrackedEndorphins]

And rarely works with any other language than isn't english

[@lifthras11r]

AI captioning does help trivial but time-consuming tasks. I have seen enough streamers who actively use AI captioning as a draft for the final caption. But that's still only a draft and has to be cleaned up. Streamers do know what they have said so such cleanup is not very hard, but it is generally hard to verify and fix AI-generated captions.

[@speedstyle.]

The models used on youtube etc aren't great. Whisper is as good as professional transcribers, try the colab notebook

[@insederec]

I'm quite glad to have AI captioning for the many millions of videos out there that don't have dedicated stenographers for them, it's quite impressive how far it's come. Even if there's no replacing a skilled steno, I wouldn't want to go back to before AI captions.

[@Mochi.Rin_Official]

Matt: "I'm a child" you are, and don't let go of that part of you.

[@hoej]

He also has excellent stroking and hand positions.

[@harriehausenman8623]

I had to giggle so much 🤭

[@Gakulon]

Keeping that sense of joy and wonder is a fantastic thing to do (also, off topic, but i love your profile picture!!)

[@goesfarfliesnear1447]

Right? Don't grow up, it's a trap!

[@benjaminshropshire2900]

I used to work at a company that had weekly all hands meeting that went over a lot of technical content. One week the live captioning on the web stream was notably worse than usual. Turns out a different person was doing it that week. The reason the normal person wasn't their was she was at the international championship for Stenography. She won.

[@Finat0]

Okay that's realy awesome. I love that

[@blancfilms]

12:01 "the naughty word would come up but you'd have to double stroke it" 👀

[@Beany87]

🤣

[@amyshaw893]

The thing I love about this series is you watch a professional do it and it looks easy, but Matt is the average person (in this situation) to show how hard it is. It's like the thing I see occasionally about just picking randomly from the population for the Olympics, to show how hard the games actually are

[@fedsavi]

Not being able to recommend new Tom Scott stuff, KZbin freaked out and recommended me Tom Scott adjacent stuff. Great video btw

[@Teverell]

I think that's what happened to me, too, not sure I would have found this otherwise! Really interesting to actually see how's it done.

[@itskdog]

Check out the past episodes, Matt's done a couple before this, basically doing TechDif Adventures but without the others reacting. It's great stuff and really interesting.

[@harriehausenman8623]

Yeah! This is the first time I heard about this channel, which is quite concerning, tbh.

[@1One2Three5Eight13]

I can imagine that stenographers have a similar visceral reaction to "just use AI" as tech people would to "we should vote online!" or the like.

[@limejet]

or indeed as tech people would to "just use AI"

[@HALLish-jl5mo]

It will get there. Though, more realistically, courtrooms could just record audio. It doesn’t need to be written down in real time. For that application we’ve solved it with technology already. Captioning the news live though, that requires a stenographer for now.

[@MacCalder86]

Many courts do use audio - then it gets transcribed - often using text to speech programs with manual corrections.

[@vatnidd]

@@HALLish-jl5mo Very often in courtrooms lawyers and judges might want clarification of what was just said a minute ago, so court reporting still needs to be in real time.

[@vatnidd]

@@MacCalder86 Especially in countries where their languages don't have established steno theories.

[@TheNerdyArcher]

As someone who's been curious about how stenography works, this was really interesting to see!

[@TheMan83554]

The bit at the end about recording and machine transcription, computer tools are good for places where there is error tolerance, alexa and siri can be error tolerant, you just ask again. Court rooms need to be very accurate and we still can't beat a human brain on accuracy.

[@beth12svist]

Ditto for automatic translation. There's a lot of nuance in usage and context and languages by no means phrasing the same thought the same way that automatic translation can still introduce an awful lot of misleading errors that an experienced human translator can immediately catch. Doubly so in specialist fields with specialist terminology. ETA: And I really, really don't want this to be read as "the way to go is automatic translation checked by humans" because that, in effect, is highly expert people being paid less than minumum wage for what is often still a complete rephrasing and complete translation from scratch of whatever garbage the computer wrote. 🙄

[@thomasdalton1508]

What you can do is have a computer transcribe and then get a human to check it. Even with a human stenographer, they will often record the proceeding as well so they can check their work afterwards. If you watch live TV with subtitles, you'll often see the subtitles being corrected in real time - I think that's often a human correcting the computer (although the computer may be relying on a human respeaking everything since humans are better at isolating a voice from background noise). The technology is just about there to replace the live stenography, but you still need the checking afterwards. We may only be a few years away from being able to dispense with the checking for all but the most critical uses, though.

[@route2070]

Especially when someone is frustrated or confused. You have lay people dealing with professional lawyers where the lawyer is trying to get the layperson witness to say something and that can be a rough experience so they go from a normal and calm voice to being aggravated, and I don't know if tech can work with that.

[@JessicaKStark]

@@thomasdalton1508 That's what dictaphones were for, yeah. They'd record the speech and then you played it back with a foot pedal. So you can basically do one word at a time as fast as you can type.

[@thomasdalton1508]

@@JessicaKStark Dictaphones were mostly used for dictating for a secretary to type up rather than a stenographer. The secretary would just be using a regular qwerty keyboard. I think that's why you need the foot pedal - a secretary with a normal keyboard won't necessarily be able to keep up.

[@PinkSupervisor]

This is not only a great series, this also looks so fun to me. The concept of "Man, I barely know anything about XY, I wish I could just try it - so I did" is so appealing.

[@harriehausenman8623]

And Matt is the perfect host 🤗

[@natalyadell5099]

As a deaf person who uses verbatim captioning (and hates AI speech recognition captioning 'respeaking' as now used commonly on TV) this is a great video. Leah is brilliant, I have seen her work before, she's very very fast AND accurate and a lovely person to boot. Trying to read respeaking captioning is nearly impossible cos it constantly corrects while coming up on the screen which gives me a huge headache, it's also a lot slower, it can't really go above 150-180 wpm, whereas good STTR (speech to text reporting) done by Steno or Palantype (two different chorded systems) can do 200 minimum and I've seen them go to 280-300+ wpm accurately. I just wish I'd known about STTR sooner, when I was a student as I really struggled and burned out not hearing properly and from listening effort. Good STTR increases my audio capacity by about 5x.

[@harriehausenman8623]

Thanks for the insightful share! 🤗

[@goesfarfliesnear1447]

That's so interesting. I asked one of my steno teachers about why the TV captions were so just wrong at times and she said it was due to AI. I'm still learning and have the option to eventually go into verbatim captioning. Thanks for posting, it was an informative insight.

[@crunchyplasma1876]

If you want to try out stenography without spending thousands on a machine, there is a program called plover which you can use to write steno with a regular keyboard. You just need to make sure your keyboard has n-key rollover.

[@satibel]

And if you start getting serious, you can make a steno keyboard for fairly cheap, you basically need someone with a 3d printer or a printing service, a soldering Iron and soldering wire, keys, an Arduino atmega32u4, diodes and wires. All in all, depending on how much material you have and your experience, count 30 min to 4 hours and 30 to 100 bucks (though you can now get a good resin 3d printer for fairly cheap, so you might just want to get that if you're using a few times instead of a printing service. Also it's a great first soldering project tbh, lots of easy soldering, and you don't risk shorting stuff out. If you want tactile but silent keys, the ones I'd recommend are the durock/jwick taro, very stable and have a great detent. You can add o-rings on your keys if you want to avoid hard bottoming out. I don't have experience with clicky or linear switches so can't recommend specific ones kailh makes decent affordable switches though but not sure if they're the best.

[@dawnless852]

A company called stenokeyboards sells stenotypes for just a 100 dollars, and they recently launched a Kickstarter for an even cheaper steno! I definitely recommend getting a machine like that, as keyboard steno isn't very pleasant. Plus, the uni 4 that they sell supports built in steno software using javelin! You can plug it in anywhere and it just works, without any set up on the pc

[@amartini51]

There are also a bunch of free learning materials around Plover too!

[@sirBrouwer]

I have seen others buy a very cheap (musical) keyboard they could plug in to a screen. As the finger movement bare more similar.

[@codenamelambda]

@@sirBrouwer IIRC there's an Italian machine stenography system that actually uses a keyboard that is essentially just a musical keyboard - that said, I think mapping (most) English steno (systems) onto a musical keyboard may be difficult reg. all the combinations of keys you have to be able to hit with a single finger though - presumably you'd need a dictionary specifically for that input method I think?

[@SeanBZA]

My sister was a court transcriber, though she would work off cassette tapes of the proceedings, and in the beginning she was using a Selectric typewriter, and only after the court got fast enough computers, as the original AT and 386 machines were too slow to use, as she would out type the keyboard buffer regularly, so needed something past 50MHz running MSDOS and Word Perfect. Lots of macros as well, and a whole lot of muscle memory as well. Peaked at around 200WPM at times, and would churn out at least a case a day as well. Took her a while to adapt to Word, and she does go through keyboards, using them to the point the entire keyboard was worn down to plain caps, only the touch type bumps left on F and J as guide. Now out of practise, she is only around 80-100WPM now, doing lots of data entry and invoicing, plus lots of other work.

[@beebware]

Ah, the delay on early x86 machines. I remember a pre-Window word processing program which would very very slightly stall at the end of the line: as I was already touch typing at 120wpm+ at that point, the first letter or two of every line would be missing.

[@flippetskater]

WordPerfect's hotkeys (macros) were amazing. I used to be a clerk for a county drug identification lab, responsible for typing the reports from the chemists' notes for drug court use. The hotkeys made it SO fast and easy, with all the typical phrases that were used repeatedly. We kept using WordPerfect long after most people had switched to Word, because the macros were just not the same.

[@strabbie9548]

I wonder who came up with all these shortcuts and how they decided which ones to use. I came in here with one question "what even is stenography" and came out with a bunch of language optimisation questions. Absolutely amazing thanks. Also, first time I was happy to see a sponsor.

[@efhiii]

There are a lot of different "theories" on how the shortcuts work, and as stenographers go through their careers, it's normal for people to develop their own modifications that fit their particular style and the types of words they see the most in their work. I personally use the RWG Theory aka Robert Walsh Gonzalez Theory which was developed by Allen Roberts, John Walsh, and Jean Gonzalez. The theory is mainly taught at South Coast College in Orange County in California, and Jean Gonzalez still works there. Other well known theories include StenEd, Plover Theory (which is open source and based on StenEd), Phoenix, and Magnum.

[@Kulpo]

Depends on the theory. There are many competing theories that differ in some aspects that I couldn't tell you. The basics stay mostly the same though and for most words that you end up hearing but arent covered by your theory. You just update the dictionary yourself with what you feel is the best stroke for that word!

[@louis1001]

What I want to do now is learn a little about this and figure out how to make it a syllabic writing system for English. When they described being able to type syllables, words or sentences my first thought was how similar of a concept it sounds to Korean Hangul.

[@efhiii]

​@@louis1001 Stenography was originally exclusively written. It wasn't until about the early 1900s that machine steno became a thing. Gregg Shorthand and Pitman Shorthand were the standard for a decently long time for English transcribing, and written shorthand goes back a very long way.

[@louis1001]

@@efhiii oh, interesting. Thanks!

[@CrilG-Games]

MATT!!! well done with getting a sponsor!! (hoping this series can continue!!) also edit: is that the studio/hall used for tech diff things?

[@Quacky_Batak]

i was thinking the same. It looks like the new hall for tech diff. Would be fun to see tech diff team react to "Matt gray trys"

[@barneylaurance1865]

@@Quacky_Batak Could well be Limehouse Town Hall.

[@johnkeefer8760]

It is the same hall! Tom has also used it in a number of his videos. My theory (although I don’t know if it’s true) is that Tom owns the building as his “headquarters” or office where he stores his equipment, can use the facility, film, etc. But I would love to hear what Tom/Matt say about it!

[@3thanguy7]

it's also definitely the hall Tom used in the video where he used the skeleton lie detector

[@currykingwurst6393]

@@barneylaurance1865 It does say "Location: Limehouse Town Hall" in the description.

[@singerofsongs468]

My great grandmother was a stenographer for the US Supreme Court, presumably a long time before any of these special stenography machines were around. Consequently, the mental image I (and I think many others) have of stenographers and the profession in general is like 70 years out of date! It was really cool to hear about the tech that’s currently in use and get an inside peek at this important form of record keeping.

[@ToppyTree]

what incredible guests

[@gillianboate]

When ye are talking about the word "F*ck" and one's like "so now I *double stroke* for that" had me giggling!

[@jollyfish84]

They were lovely ladies! I love their enthusiasm for something that on the surface looks like it could be quite dull but actually isn't at all. I also clapped when I saw the ad come on (which is weird, because who claps for ads usually?!) but I hope that will mean more of these in the future.

[@evilmorganfreeman2726]

obviously alot of these videos wouldve already been filmed, but I would love more in doing "blue collar" jobs, I've always been really fascinated by the processes, like the line painting one, just little insites into the skills. Still loved this video and looking forward to see what comes next

[@duncanhw]

specifically in the theme "better than AI"

[@devttyUSB0]

I love how Leah turned red at the finger-in-the-crack joke. What a great video and experience!!

[@ethmodecroft7233]

Videos like these are amazing because if nothing else they help demystify aspects of it that I would have no clue where to look for answers or to even begin questioning

[@y_fam_goeglyd]

Imagine being taught this early in highschool, particularly with the new machines. You could become really proficient before you go into the "exam years" where prep for your various major school-leaving/going to uni exams requires a _lot_ of note taking! Ditto with taking notes in uni lectures. This could have saved me a whole load of agony from RSI and later on, osteoarthritis! On top of which, training to become a pro stenographer wouldn't take nearly as long 😊. Fascinating video, Matt. Many thanks to the ladies for their help and expertise. I'm thoroughly enjoying this series; each job is so different from anything I've done and some (already!) are ones I've wondered about, particularly stenography. Whatever you do next, have fun!

[@harriehausenman8623]

Exactly! Why even bother talking about these other "layouts" when this is working perfectly.

[@EcceJack]

I'll watch the whole thing later, but just a note on the title card: The Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures were on the topic of AI this winter. This is the second year they've livestreamed the recording of them to some science centres around the UK. Last year they used AI to get live subtitles for these livestreams. This year - despite the topic being AI - they opted for humans to do that work, because they were just... simply much better at it :D

[@charliespinoza1966]

Stenography and shorthand always seem kind of like magic, this was very cool. These vids are such a lift!

[@nickfosterxx]

Bought a book on shorthand in about 1976 thinking it would be great for university - verbatim lectures! Took one look and thought.... aaah crap no chance. Was given a portable typewriter two years later. Obvs completely unsuitable for lectures, but with hindsight wish I'd given it a go on April 1st. My markers must have been grateful though because my handwriting looked like Arabic.

[@felixsmdt]

The fact that just because you said Alexa, my Alexa (that isn't even set to English) went off and turned the lights in the room off proves why AI isn't there yet

[@i.gaskoid]

Love the clear visuals and step-by-steps -- makes it easier for novices to visualise what looks like such a difficult occupation to master! Wow. Shout out to stenographers everywhere

[@cosmicjenny4508]

The slow zoom when you started talking about how complicated it was going to get was very funny. And yes, this is way more complicated than I thought! Amazing.

[@Gulliolm]

Matt i love your brain. You are interested in the same topics that i am but you are more invested in learning about them than i am. (also, i miss(ed) your dirty jokes from the very old tech diff stuff :D )

[@tessiepinkman]

I've always been incredibly fascinated by stenography. I must confess that I'm a little bit jealous that you got the chance to learn a bit from these two fabulous ladies! I'd really like that. It seems unbelievably hard. It's just like you said in the beginning, it looks like they are playing an instrument rather than writing. It's so cool!

[@v6243_____]

these ladies are so patient and sweet! wonderful guests to your fun little antics

[@JQSHl]

Ah, a new Matt Gray video! Today is a good day!

[@Zadster]

Fascinating stuff! It definitely fits into the "I would love to try this but I have absolutely no idea why" category. Good to see you have a sponsor, hopefully this will mean you get to do more things like this. Glad I'm not the only person who reads colours as resistor (and capacitor) values!

[@lwinklly]

video from matt gray yay I've wanted to learn stenography too but never got the hang of it on my heavy-switch keyboard

[@lwinklly]

inb4 Plover comments

[@quehablo]

Yeah, it's super important to use lighter switches or your hand gets exhausted lol. My main steno machine has 20g springs lol

[@IzzyIkigai]

Matt just completely taking over Tom Scott's role while also having more of the wonder you see in a child's eyes while learning about new things is the best thing that happened in 2024. This is so much better.

[@goesfarfliesnear1447]

Matt! I'm a steno student learning court reporting on the other side of the pond. It was sooooo helpful to see these ladies explain some of these things. Plus, you are very entertaining! Thank you and you should give this a go, I think you're a natural! Me, I'm not too sure about, grrr. Cheers from Seattle!

[@muenstercheese]

matt, i'm LOVING this series. i've always wondered about these... maybe i'll go out and try it myself after this!

[@RossParker1877]

The Tech Diff town hall in use again. You'll be on mates rates by now Matt 😂❤

[@MercenaryPen]

not sure there would be mates rates considering its likely owned by a public body of some description and they tend to be notoriously short of cash...

[@sirBrouwer]

@@MercenaryPen they are also often notoriously cheap on the off peak hours. (peak hours would be after school/work hours during the week and the weekend it self) If you can rent it out during work hours the small bit extra cash is welcome if the rest of the building has to stay open anyways.

[@Kummahndough]

Court stenography was always something I wanted to know about. Thank you for bringing it more into the public eye!

[@aqwek]

it was great to see this video! being a stenographer myself, not only is it great to see others trying it, but it's great to see professionals, not just hobbyists, in this video! i was surprised when Mary's dictionary used P for "approximately" but i see why, it's pretty common

[@57thorns]

AI will have a hard time for a while yet, and voice recordings will not help with instant subtitling. In court rooms voice recordings are great for archiving, but again, the near instant typing really helps. Sure, you can claim "I did not say that", but then going back to the recording will show that yes you did, and with a good stenografer there will be fewer instances of someone mishearing a statement.

[@nathan_allen]

I don't know why but I love the little pause icon that pops up in the corner, I don't think I've seen it anywhere else before

[@hantuchblau]

Shoutout to the open source software plover, which lets you try steno on any n-key-rollover keyboard. It also works with proper steno machines, and there are a number of open 3d printed steno keyboards which you can buy or build yourself. Court reporting steno machines are *really* expensive.

[@memyselfiamweird]

Wow, I'd heard of stenography but never known what it was. In another lifetime, I may have pursued this as a career. Not where I thought your next video was going to go, but excellent nonetheless! Thank you!

[@LaRocheSews]

Woah suddenly I want to become a stenographer

[@o0Pezinator0o]

This is so awesome. The perfect blend of interesting, detailed explanations and fun duck/truck/lucking around!

[@dianahellman9254]

I'll chime in and agree - I've always been curious about stenography and how those machines work! Thanks so much for trying this out and for finding these experts!!! Also, I'm happy to see the sponsor!!

[@beth12svist]

I only in maybe the last week found out that modern stenography was done with typing on a keyboard, so this was an excellent video with excellent timing for me!

[@_interficere]

Bravo Matt, and three cheers for Mary and Leah. Great video, great channel. Best of luck with future endeavours.

[@NonTwinBrothers]

As a current steno student I am contractually obligated to comment on how nice the captions are :D

[@watcherofwatchers]

These are some very knowledgeable, skilled, and quite nice ladies!

[@0LoneTech]

8:15 The particular value of 150 ohms is brown green brown, as on the punsch-roll pastry (brown chocolate and green marzipan).

[@johncoles]

This was brilliant. Having been amazed by watching stenographers typing out captions behind the scenes at events it's really great to see such an honest charming video on them. They both seem like lovely people, kinda makes me want to learn to become one!

[@vatnidd]

Yesssss! I've been learning stenography for over a year now and really fascinating! I'm so glad you're having fun with it.

[@midorinchan]

I wasn't expecting something so informative, I love learning about anything that has to do with language like this

[@FelineFurKin]

This is a lovely video, such enthusiasm. I’ve known these ladies a long time, used to edit documents for a few stenographers, so this is really fun to see.

[@liamtahaney713]

These ladies seem like really lovely teachers. What a confusingly simple process. Cant imagine how it works woth japanese

[@Poppamunz]

It'd probably be even easier in Japanese, considering the language has fewer sounds and less complex syllables

[@LearnedB]

The layout of the keys on a US English steno machine is based on the frequency of sounds in the language. This can make writing foreign language words difficult. Other countries do have their own steno machines, with the keys assigned as diffferent sounds

[@animyosfox8617]

The German parliament stenographs all of its debates, including the interjections. For this purpose, the stenographers have their own table facing the ranks. These protocols are truly fascinating, and they contain many things that just could not be heard on the recording.

[@insu_na]

Another reason why you don't want AI transcribing court proceedings is that the person transcribing takes on the responsibility of accuracy. With a stenographer you have a person you can point to when something is wrongly transcribed, but with an AI there is no person with legal liability, and especially no person who can vouch for accuracy.

[@MTRNord]

You got me hyped to modify the config of my QMK keyboard for this :D

[@llaughridge]

Matt - There are two varieties of stenography: Using the machine as you demonstrated (mostly court reporters), and handwritten (old-timey secretaries). The handwritten method is done on about A5-sized top-spiral-bound notepads ('steno pads") using a handwriting technique called Gregg Shorthand. It would be great if you did a follow-up video talking about Gregg Shorthand and how it was used.

[@martinfalkjohansson5204]

Don't forget Pitman's!

[@achimwasp]

In GB it's mostly Teeline now, as it was (is it still?) a mandatory skill for journalists. Here in Germany we have a system similar to Pitman (the "DEK"). Gregg has the advantage of being rather easily adaptable to German and Spanish - that's whiy I will change to it (just as a hobbyist).

[@robertlister4864]

Good to see you at Limehouse Town Hall. I miss that wonky bonky old place! I'm always very impressed with the stenographers at things like the RIPE conferences. They transcribe every session for an entire week, and have learned all the various technical jargon and acronyms we use, and all manner of broken English accents. It must be exhausting! Being techies, we are always very curious about how it works. Once we got them to do a little presentation at the end. We were giving them all sorts of tricky words like ''Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'... But they were ready for every challenge we could think of! 😂

[@LearnedB]

Very few of us would not have Supercalifragilisticexpialidociousas a single stroke ;) Mine is SPREURBS

[@mrab4222]

1:03 Turn on CC and see "and also we do captioning for the death and heart of hearing".

[@MattGrayYES]

You must be reading the auto-generated captions, you can change to English in the settings menu. (The captions I upload are done by humans!)

[@mrab4222]

@@MattGrayYES...which kind of proves the point that we still need people do it because they're better at it.

[@sairam2693]

@@MattGrayYES that’s very nice captioning, can I request you to let me know how the colour changes in KZbin as it usually doesn’t read hex code that straightforward.. will really help.

[@ThePoxun]

You know what might be fun... a Stenography-off with another youtuber with say 3 months to learn :D

[@libsifywriter2471]

Oh my god! This has answered so many questions for me… but now I really want a stenography machine 😂

[@WavingWorld]

Matt, your voiceover and graphics are absolutely incredible in teaching the concepts here. Bravo!

[@really-quite-exhausted]

Not only does the keyboard function like a musical instrument, i suspect that learning stenography is probably similar to learning a new musical instrument in terms of brain processes. Fascinating stuff

[@saaaaaaaar]

I don't know why KZbin brought me to a video about stenography, but I'm glad they did. Nice work!

[@dameanvil]

- [00:39] 📝 Stenography is the verbatim transcription of spoken words into written form, often displayed on screens, used for captioning and court reporting. - [09:48] 🎹 Stenography involves chord-like key combinations to represent syllables and sounds, enabling faster transcription than traditional typing. - [13:01] 🔍 Stenography utilizes phonetic spelling, where sounds are represented by combinations of strokes on the stenotype machine. - [16:18] 📝 Learning stenography involves extensive practice and repetition to master key combinations and stroke sequences for accurate transcription.

[@in2itivity]

From the video description: “as KZbin doesn't let you set custom names for caption tracks” Actually, they do! Once you've uploaded your caption track under your desired language, click on its options menu and select “Rename.” Then you can add a custom name which will be shown next to the language. Bonus, when you set a custom name for a caption track, it lets you upload another caption track under the same language, so you can have multiple named tracks under the same language.

[@douglasboyle6544]

20 years ago I dated a stenographer, they are indeed a strange breed ;) She tried to teach me how to use the machine, it was insanity! I have nothing but the utmost respect for people who do this.

[@Thawney]

matt truly is making his way across the list of things I want to try lol

[@MashedPotatoeComedy]

Loved this Matt! Hope this new show works out for you, it is brilliant

[@raynlaze1339]

Wow i've never heard or seen this stuff before, learn something new every day.

[@apt_get]

I wasn’t expecting it to be so much like Morse code! Specifically in the differentiation between the words and the syllables and the immersion to learn

[@martina5296]

I hope they get paid alot, they deserve it. Stenography is even more confusing than I thought. 😂 Glad there are people who do that job. They have incredible brains to concentrate on their jobs and listening to everything.

[@CraftsWithEllen]

Finally got around to watching this, so interesting!! And such lovely ladies.

[@Emenje]

Holy shit you actually got a good sponsorship deal, I am so happy for you!

[@WillFealey]

This is ridiculous, I love it and I love watching you explore these things Matt.

[@sarafan3]

This was fascinating, your guests were lovely, and so pleased to see you got a sponsor! Keep up the brilliant work Matt!!!

[@bastiaan1150]

This is such an understandable explanation for the basics of stenography! This video was really something that the internet was lacking. Fantastic production quality as well. Thanks Matt!

[@samuelsanders115]

I've never been so excited to see an ad! Sponsorships mean more Matt content!

[@mistaecco]

I've always wondered about how steno actually works - thank you for this little dive into it!

[@Cats-TM]

I would love to learn stenography, it is just so cool and probably useful.

[@ben0329]

Great to see another episode and hopefully the appearance of a sponsor is a promising sign for the future

[@JohnR31415]

They are amazing people - serious talent, and the ability to perform under pressure and without being distracted by the sometimes horrific content of what they are stenoing

[@sunme]

This channel is so underrated! Keep it up, brother.

[@sennal]

Didn't think I'd enjoy learning about something I didn't even know existed until now quite as much as I did. Great video Matt, and congrats on the sponsor! (OK, I've done my bit for the algorithm)

[@Carhill]

8:15 - This happened to me not too long back when I did a refresher on eyeballing resistors.

[@unclvinny]

What a completely wonderful group of people. I'm glad I stumbled on this!

[@gfixler]

I've been having fun learning stenography for a bit over 2 years now with Plover, and first a Splitography keyboard, and now 2 Unis, v3 and v4 (all 3 are great). It's super fun, and ticks a bunch of interests (hand skills, computer programming, theory, language, etc). There are a number of reasons AI doesn't work well at all in many situations, like a courtroom: 1) You have to mic everyone, or a computer can't hear them, and all of that has to be set up properly, and work. Ever been to a tech conference? Every one I've been to has 10 minutes of screwing with mics and audio levels and 5 other things at the start of every talk, before we're hopefully recording and hearing them properly. 2) Ever watch recorded tech talks (I've watched a few thousand). People coughing, blowing their noses, mumbling in the foreground, drumming their fingers on the desk the microphone is on, turning their head 90 degrees to talk about what's on the screen, away from the lapel mic on their own side, only to have their audio drop to inaudible levels... the list goes on and on. There are so many talks where I miss important bits, like part of a URL, or exactly the word that would make the bit of math make sense to me, or exactly the jargon I can't figure out any other way, or anything any questioner in the audience asked (so few speakers repeat the question, so you have no idea what they're responding to). This is crucial info in a trial, and could cause problems later with things like retrials, and appeals, but even just with reading back the last few minutes that a lawyer or judge has a question about, if the record isn't solid. 3) Fast talkers, talkers with thick accents, mumblers, people speaking over each other when things get heated... these things are very hard, or impossible to hear or understand on recordings, but the fidelity in a live setting makes it much easier, and stenographers have a long history of remarkably picking through all of it, and getting a really good record of what everyone was actually saying. They're also allowed to ask for clarification, or even to tell lawyers and judges to slow down, for the record. 4) Formatting - records aren't just linear, verbatim transcripts. All of the parts of the record have to be taken down according to style guides, all the way down to line spacing and indentation per section, how and where names are listed, in what format dates are written, the formatting of Q&A sessions, and quite a lot more, to follow particular codes and guidelines, which vary, if not between cities, at least from state to state. AI can't just wing it. It would have to be locked down pretty tightly to make a several hundred page transcript from a long-running trial actually fit legal rules and regulations, and maintain legibility as a complete, coherent document. 5) Context - stenographers do a bunch of pre-trial work, receiving depositions, running them through pretty sophisticated steno software - from companies that employ not just programmers, but also language experts - which pulls out all words (and even repeated phrases) not currently in any of their dictionary stack, and even offers really good, non-existent (and maybe even non-colliding, or rarely colliding) strokes for the steno to choose, or overwrite with their own ideas, and they may have dozens of these ready to go in a particular job file for each case, so when the lawyer says "Your honor, my client, Sarbaturi Toirdhealbhach spoke with Caoimhe (note: pronounced KEE-vah; it's Irish) Wickaninnish at Hoegaarden about the MALDI-TOF MS, which, as we defined earlier, is the Matrix and Light Disorption Ionization - Time Of Flight Mass Spectrometer..." stenographers keep up perfectly, and spelling and capitalization is all accurate. 6) Jargon - you would think stenographers can't keep up with gigantic, specialized words, and you'd be wrong. It's way harder in QWERTY, because you have to know the spelling. With steno, you often just need to know how it sounds, or make up your own shortcuts that work for you. The woman behind Plover (free/open steno software I use) has been doing realtime captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing in classes, lectures, meetings, etc., for many years, and often has to keep up with scientific and medical verbiage. The default Plover dictionary is just her personal dictionary, and it's chock full of terms like "ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid", "methylmercaptopurine", "acetylcholinesterase", and "dehydroepiandrosterone", and she has no problem keeping up with all of it, as fast as the speaker speaks. 7) What is wrong with all of you? - it's hard to understand why we as humans converge en masse on things like stenography, a 100+ year old profession, and pile on with "AI could do this!" like we're the geniuses who invented it. Like we have a dog in this fight. Why are we so self-destructive? Steno is a great career, and pays really well. It lets some people travel for work, and others, like TV, and online event captioners, work from home. There are pics and videos of people on their couches in their pajamas, live-captioning TV shows and the news, and making good money. To what end are you so desperate to take that away from them and give it to unfeeling robots who don't need it? Why not join them instead, and have a good, fun career, and feed your family, and buy yourself some fun things, like steno keyboards. Sigh... I have 5 now, and another on the way from a kickstarter.

[@blisphul8084]

You should cover Open Source Stenography, Plover. It is free, and hobbyist machines are cheap. Also, it can do many more languages, including Asian languages with different characters. You can also use it for everyday typing and computing.

[@andrineslife]

This is so cool, I've always been curious about stenography!

[@cemace90]

Very heart warming episode.

[@FallingofftheGrid]

That was absolutely wonderful and so wholesome! 💖

[@IsaacBTTF]

This was fascinating, Matt!

[@yesterdaydream]

I've always wanted to try stenography, but never wanted to invest in the equipment...thanks for letting me try it vicariously!

[@clo4]

I was just wondering when another one of these would come out, and it just so happens to be on something I’m very interested in!

[@randomviewer3494]

This is very cool! Also nice that you got a sponsor! :) Thats promising for whats fast becoming my favorite series on youtube.