Open Steno Project – Freeing stenography

I was always curious about this. My dad was a lawyer. I basically learned to touch type by transcribing legal dictations. From about 11 years old I used to earn my allowance by typing up depositions that had been recorded in his office. My mom had an electric typewriter and a tape machine with a foot pedal attachment that let you play or rewind the tape with your right foot. They'd pay me $2 an hour to sit and type…

I met someone at a conference who was both a stenographer and a developer. Because the dictionaries which convert the keystrokes into words are just JSON, he changed them to common commands/code snippets. Watching him code was mindblowing.

Here's a really interesting interview with the founder of Plover, Mirabai Knight, explaining how she got started and how efficient steno can be. "Steno is so ridiculously more efficient than typing every word out letter by letter that it’s possible to exceed the average qwerty speed in a matter of months, once you’ve got the phonetic system in your muscle memory." https://geekfeminism.org/2010/10/12/plover-freeing-stenograp...

That looks like a great project... but does stenography still have a real place in 2025? Speech to text is very advanced, sound recording is even cheaper, and can also record emotions... beside the (hopefully only short) inertia in the courtroom and the ability to say i know stenography, does knowing stenography have any other benefits?