Keyboard Builders' Digest / Keyboard Spotting
StenoWord
The StenoWord is a Japanese chorded keyboard for professionals doing subtitles for live broadcasts.
Published April 1, 2022
@riv_mk posted some keyboard photos on Twitter the other day, and one of them in particular caught my eye: the StenoWord SX-1.
It's a quite elusive Japanese board, the one you haven't even know existed but consider a real Holy Grail from now on.
I tried to do my best to dig up some info on this model but I'm fairly sure its rarity and the lack of content, combined with the language barrier, resulted in some misunderstandings on my part. Japanese readers are welcome to elucidate me.
So the StenoWord, a family of keyboards rather than a single model, was (is?) a dedicated tool for Japanese steno captioners, especially professionals who do shorthand subtitles for live broadcasts.
I managed to find a rather old and expired classified listing where the seller explains how he/she attended a training school to become such a steno captioner 20 years ago.
Using a dedicated keyboard, experts captioners can "enter more than 300 characters per minute". That's pretty similar to other Western steno systems, e.g. the Plover intro refers to "over 200 words per minute" as real-time speed.
So basically the StenoWord keyboard was for stenography, just like ones used in the US in legal proceedings, during court reporting, but also live captioning.
In many parts of the world, especially with heavily agglutinating languages, stenography done by steno keyboards is practically unknown and non-existent. It wouldn't make any sense in my native Hungarian either (with hundreds of thousands of different word forms).
Real-time captioning or captioning per se isn't a thing either in many parts of the world.
However, the Japanese language seems to fit this purpose and as of my understanding captions are everywhere there.
So before broadcasters started captioning their programs using speech recognition technologies, all the subtitles were done manually.
Below is a short video featuring StenoWord keyboards in action and ladies real-time captioning everything from horse racing commentary to an interview with a crying man – both topics pretty hard to do properly with sound recognition I would guess. And these women can take a rest only during commercials. It must be a pretty though job.
There were several contemporary steno and other chorded projects featured in KBD.news earlier: Korea Steno's Smart CAS Plus, Velotype Pro, the Uni or this heavily modded Gigi – and many other projects.
Designing and building a steno board is a relatively easy and cheap project nowadays: there is Plover, an open-source steno engine, QMK supports stenography too, and the small number of keys makes building such a keyboard very affordable.
However, this wasn't the case earlier: steno hardware and software was proprietary, cost a fortune, and that's exactly why the Open Steno Project and Plover were brought to existence.
The situation was probably similar in Japan: according to the seller mentioned above, a used StenoWord cost more than 100,000 yen ($800+) at the time.
This keyboard was not on sale, and I asked my teacher for a second-hand keyboard that I could use at the academy and he sold me one for home practice. It cost more than 100,000 yen at that time.
However, purchasing this specific one proved to be quite lucrative for the seller since after two decades is was sold for 246,000 yen after 125 bids – that's more than $2,200 USD (2021)!
Now a few words about the layout. Custom DIY steno boards are usually small and cute. But not the StenoWord!
While there are just ten keys for the alphas/numbers, the layout sports dedicated F-keys, a modifier row, full arrow and navigation cluster as well as a numpad – so the overall form factor is not much smaller than that of a standard keyboard.
As far as I know, there's no space character between words in Japanese and although the spacebar is on the right thumb key, it's probably on a secondary layer and the home thumb keys are mostly for changing logical layers.
That's all I could figure out with my limited knowledge of Japanese so native speakers are welcome to post their comments below the related Twitter post.
Published on Fri 1st Apr 2022. Featured in KBD #72.
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