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

This was like learning a new language, and a new musical instrument, all while semi-blindfolded!

📋 Credits 📋
Series Producer/Director: Cambria Bailey-Jones
Producer: Jacob Trueman
Executive Producer: Guy Larsen

Special thanks to

🥚 Easter Egg 🥚
I have added an unmodified computer-generated captions track so you can see the difference between that and a human-made one. These were generated within Adobe Premiere Pro.
It's listed as Klingon captions, as YouTube doesn't let you set custom names for caption tracks.

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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.

[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.

[Mochi.Rin_Official]

Matt: "I'm a child"

you are, and don't let go of that part of you.

[benjaminshropshire]

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.

[TheMan]

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.

[blancfilms]

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

[OneThreeEight]

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.

[TheNerdyArcher]

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

[fedsavi]

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

[amyshaw]

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

[crunchyplasma]

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.

[natalyadell]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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?

[strabbie]

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.

[gillianboate]

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

[singerofsongs]

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.

[jollyfish]

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.

[evilmorganfreeman]

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

[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