In an Age of High-Definition Digital Audio, Why Do We Still Use Human Stenographers?

Ah, the dreaded questions stenographers and court reporters have had to endure hearing over and over again: “Why are we still hiring stenographers when we could just be recording the proceedings and typing them up later?” and “Isn’t your job going to be obsolete soon?”

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).