This incredible rate of writing lets a high-quality stenographer keep up with complex conversations, even when multiple people may be speaking in a court or event setting. These stenotype machines work by typing in syllables rather than letters. However, in order to create complex and varied sounds as quickly as possible, each stroke on a stenotype will typically involve multiple keys.
In the time it takes us to type three individual letters, a stenographer can type an entire word with the help of a stenotype machine. Because of this condensed form of typing, a stenotype keyboard has only 22 keys. This is opposed to normal computer keyboards, which have between 70 and keys. The stenotype can be so condensed because of the chord system — by combining keys you have hundreds of combinations to make different syllables quickly.
Of course, typing in phonetic syllables does not create your typical English sentence — it does not even include spaces. Older versions of the stenotype created lists of complex characters or punches in a paper that had to be interpreted later and written into an understandable English translation. Thanks to modern technology, stenotype machines can automatically compare the syllables written to a standard or custom dictionary and output the corresponding English.
The computer adds spaces and interprets words, and while not always perfect, gets better with each iteration of stenotype technology. This is fairly simple: all court reporters are stenographers, but not all stenographers are court reporters. Stenographers can offer services as medical transcriptionists, realtime TV captioners, as well as in numerous accessibility fields think transcribing voice calls for deaf users. These stenographer services are widely varied in difficulty and importance of accuracy.
Court reporters are specialized, highly trained stenographers. Certain combinations of adjacent keys correspond to the missing consonants: For example, there's no "M" anywhere on the keyboard, so you have to press "P" and "H" together to start a syllable with that sound. There is a "B" on the right side of the board, but none on the left—that means it's easy to end a syllable with "B," but for words that begin with "B" you need to hit "P" and "W" together.
Each stenographer might use different conventions to represent homonyms or other ambiguous words. At court-reporting school, you can learn one of at least half a dozen machine shorthand "theories," which teach different approaches and general rules. But any experienced stenographer will work out his or her own abbreviations, especially for words and phrases particular to a given job.
Later on, the stenographer would translate the notes back to English, and sometimes another stenographer, called a "scopist," would check the translation. This type of machines is also used to produce captions for TV broadcasts, live streaming transcripts at meetings and at schools, and for office stenography in general.
Stenographs are working a bit like portable word processors, but they have a modified keyboard with 22 buttons instead of a standard keyboard. Now how do stenographers work? Court stenographers may be typing entire words if they strike more keys at the same time. The left keys are for spelling the beginning letter of a syllable, and the right-hand keys are for the last letter.
The stenographer presses all relevant keys at the same time, and the stenographic machine will come up with an alphabet soup that is unintelligible for persons who are not trained to read machine shorthand.
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