Great presentation.   There was someone (proword) on the forum doing a kind of halfway house between typing and steno, adding input shortcuts alongside their maltron for some pretty great speeds.  That talk was inspirational, I might have tried steno instead of Dvorak, but I'd be pretty reluctant to relinquish it after the hard slog of learning.  I am smitten with the idea of trying to do something with software.  Someone also mentioned that Koreans use phonetics for text entry.   The steno entries looked really alien, but I dare say, it may well be far easier than touch typing.  They could do with an opensource input device, that isn't a crappy old keyboard - appreciate the comprimise though.

Well it still seems that steno is the tool of choice for real time transcription.  It must be fast.  The computer keyboard has it's humble roots in something that resembled a... keyboard... so it's not a million miles away.  Back then, I bet there was a mechanical limitation, of one glyph to one key.  Getting an upper case character requires a shift: a lift of the carriage, which is awkward, but an interesting hack!  Perhaps without the limitation we would have seen less keys and more chords, especially with the popularity of pianos.  I'm not that great at chords on a computer keyboard, but that's not to say that I couldn't use them on 'something else'.

The processing power of a modern computer is awesome, so why not take advantage of a little processing in between?  Spelling each word out is rather laborious and pretty tedious.

Three years into touch typing (with a 'better' layout than Qwerty), and I'm still only plodding along at about 60wpm, and it just doesn't feel fast enough to me.   I can't help but think that text entry on a computer, is just a barrier to interfacing with the machine, and a barrier to communication.  It's socially awkward.  The internet brings the potential for larger audiences and easy duplication of data, but at the expense of information density because of that limitation.  I feel stiffled and I'm almost proficient with a keyboard!  Have you watched how other ordinary mortals struggle?  There's got to be a better, faster and easier way.  Perhaps it is steno.  Which may have been adopted if ther was cheap ubiquitous hardware and software that supported it.