In an Age of High-Definition Digital Audio, Why Do We Still Use Human Stenographers?
By: Stanley Sakai
Tags: Technology, Stenography, Court Reporting, Keyboard, Tech

For full disclosure, I am now a software engineer. But I’ve worked as a professional freelance stenographer for six years prior to my transition. Although my main source of income no longer comes from providing live-captioning services, stenography is and always will be a passion of mine. It is such an intelligently and ergonomically designed input system that, whether it be code or prose that I’m writing, it makes my experience on the computer feel fluent and effortless—unhindered as compared to having to tap my thoughts out character by character on a normal keyboard. As an engineer, I write code, write PRs, review others’ PRs, and deploy to production all from my steno machine. Thanks to steno, I can send Slack communications at the speed of thought. I have shortcuts in the hundreds ranging from Docker and rake tasks to git commands programmed in so I can perform pulls, pushes, stashes, pops, checkouts, and countless other functions with one swift motion of the hand (TKRA*EUBG = docker-compose run — rm app rake repo:db:init).

I’m seldom without a steno machine if I have my computer on me. And, yes, I have more than one of these keyboards. My portable one, as shown above, is a 3D-printed mod and it uses light-touch mechanical-keyboard switches—perfect for when I’m on the go or working from one of our satellite offices.

With a single chord, KPWRAERBGT (IMPRAERKT), I can import React faster than you can hit “i” on your keyboard. 😝

If you aren’t familiar with what stenography (or “steno” for short) is, it’s the system of chorded input performed on a special keyboard communicating with shorthand-to-text software that court reporters and captioners use to quickly write down what is said in a courtroom, on TV, in lectures, or at Coachella (video). Basically, this amounts to a single person being able to catch and write down what a roomful of people are saying, verbatim, in real time. Olympic-level note-taking.

People normally speak English at around a rate of 160–220 words per minute. A skilled stenographer is able to hold a writing speed in excess of 200 words per minute for hours. To become nationally certified, one must pass a series of speed tests on a shorthand machine—the final of which requires one to transcribe a two-voice Q&A dictation at an unrelenting rate of 225 words per minute at >95% accuracy for five full minutes… in one take. The world record for steno speed is 360 words per minute for one minute, set by Mark Kislingbury. If you’ve never seen one of these steno machines before, meet Andromeda:

You can thank Andromeda for this story you’re reading now. And, no, what you’re looking at is not a “cash register.”

As for how steno actually works, that’s for its own article entirely. What I’m here to discuss in this piece is why this craft is still integral and relevant to the legal and hearing-accessibility realms. It is currently under siege by numerous unscrupulous wielders of magic microphones who profess, “Digital recording is the future!” and fallaciously claim that simply replacing the stenographer with a microphone will cut costs and produce comparable, if not better transcriptions than one taken stenographically by hand. After all, stenographers are humans, too: we make mistakes, we need breaks, we get hungry, and we tire like everyone else. Technology, including a microphone, does not. So much easier and cheaper; right?

“Hey, yo! Just throw one of these babies in, check!”

Well, this seemingly obvious and viable alternative is problematic for several reasons.

I mean, if you’re fortunate enough to have a smartphone, you have an audio recorder right in your pocket. Go to Best Buy, and you can find recorders with great audio quality for a fairly cheap price. Memory is also now extremely cheap. But go talk to any lawyer who’s conducted a deposition, and they’ll quickly tell you that stenographers’ fees aren’t cheap and can raise the cost of litigation by several figures depending on the length of the transcript and how many copies are sold. Court reporters typically charge a flat appearance fee and then by the page, so if you have a 300-page transcript and all parties are ordering copies, you might be in for sticker shock. So if we have this much-thriftier alternative, doesn’t it just make economic sense to let a recorder do the “work” and commission a bargain-basement transcription service to type it up for you later?