How do Court Reporters Type Incredibly Fast?

By Anupum Pant

I’ve always heard about short-hand, but I never cared to look it up and how it actually works. I had assumed that it must be very similar to what we type and it was a way to make your tyiping faster. Turns out, I was wrong. It’s very different.

Whatever happens in the court goes on record. There’s no computer doing the speech to text there. It’s humans. These people are trained to type about 200 words per minute and can manage an accuracy of 98.5%. That’s pretty incredible. But how they do it is a different story.

stenoThey use a different keyboard which has just 22 keys. There’s no full body QWERTY keyboard and it looks something like this.

Instead of typing down the whole word, they listen to how it sounds. The context doesn’t even matter to them. They just record the sounds. A long word can be completed in just a few strokes with their technique.

via [todolivas]

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