Concept: A Low Force / Quiet Steno Keyboard with Capacitive Keycaps

[atkuilas]

I confess, this can be a very stupid idea =P

        Capacitive keycaps

                        +

        Mechanism that provides haptic feedback

The end result might ended up behaves like LightSpeed by Stenovations. (www.stenovations.com)

Other touch screen technologies like resistive can be use if it suits the task better.

Some potential benefits include:

        It incorporates touch screen grade sensitivity with physical keys to provide haptic feedback and to serve as guidance of where to put the fingers on

        Extremely low actuation force

        Haptic feedbacks other than mechanical switches made possible, e.g. magnets, springs, levers

        Can be made quieter than mechanical switches

        Can be made more lightweight and thin

        Promotes good typing habits, e.g. lighter press on keys, minimum motion

        Less mechanical parts to fail

        Possibilities provided by touch screen technologies, e.g. temporarily turning certain key caps into scroll wheel/trackpad, pressure sensitivity, tracks hovering fingers' motion to warn the typist if his/her fingers are moving too wildly

Possible shortcomings:

        Too different from what people are used to

        Keys are registered BEFORE being pressed down. Can be problematic on a conventional keyboard as input appears on screen before the keys are being depressed. Not that much of a problem on steno keyboard though-- the inputs are sent only after all the keys had been released anyway

        Too sensitive

        Typist can't rest their fingers on the keys

        Incompatible with non-slip pads

Make it a split keyboard, with vertically adjustable key columns to better accommodate individual finger's length, then it might ended up being one of the more ergonomic steno keyboards on the market :-D

[Aziz Yemloul]

I suggested this in the classroom months ago but I got raised eyebrows.

What if every single stroke get its corresponding sound played back ?

Cheers

[Steven Bhardwaj]

You mean each key gets a note in something like the major scale? 24 keys would fit well over three octaves.

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[Aziz Yemloul]

No, I meant each "chord" get its sound played back...

Thanks for the observation

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[atkuilas]

What if every single stroke get its corresponding sound played back ?

 

Although there's no chord being played in this video, I'm pretty sure it'll ended up with something quite like this:

        www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MjPbAU_VzE

        www.instructables.com/id/Capacitive-Touch-Arduino-Keyboard-Piano/

Only up to 18 keys with an Arduino Uno though. But with an Arduino Mega, it can be implement with over 60 keys.

More information on making DIY capacitive button with Arduino:

        www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHQPqQ_5ulc

        http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/CapacitiveSensor

[atkuilas]

Okay here's one with chord being played:

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMZs5zPzXVQ

On Sunday, July 13, 2014 8:52:05 PM UTC+8, Aziz Yemloul wrote:

[paulo paniago]

 Hello Aziz!

I don’t know if this is the purpose of your suggestion, but it could be fun. I guess giving melody to chords while typing, may make the strokes easier to memorize. That is because your sense of hearing will also be integrated in the neural process of learning. Also, it can make the training less tiring and more stimulating or at least gives it some variability. Perhaps this could be added to one of those steno games in here.

[atkuilas]

Hi paulo,

    I can recall how the tone being played after pressing a number on a telephone helped me remember the phone number. Or at least I'll notice that I've typed in a wrong number if the tone it made sounded different from what's in my memory.

[atkuilas]

Some Follow Up on the Capacitive Keyboard Concept

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

        Judging from the videos of DIY capacitive pianos on YouTube, it appears that a capacitive keyboard can, too, be DIY with relative reasonable cost and technical knowhow. Although without a mechanism to provide haptic feedback, I doubt that it will perform any better than a touch screen steno app with a decent silicone overlay.

        I've Googled about commercially available capacitive buttons and most websites seems to require further contact for the pricing. Alps for example, offer a range of capacitive input products [www.alps.com/prod/info/E/HTML/InputDevice/index.html]. Wikipedia has a list of companies that offers capacitive touch switch [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_switch#Capacitance_touch_switch].

        A Capacitive Round Switch sells by PCB Gadgets costs $18.95 each [http://pcbgadgets.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=51

]. Cirque offers a touch sensor developement kit which costs $500, and both their dual-axis, linear, and circular development module costs $50 each [www.cirque.com/developersupport/glidesensordevelopmentkit/glidesensorproducts.aspx]. Here's a list of "Capacitive Touch Sensors, Proximity Sensor ICs" with the cheaper ones with minimum order quantity of 1 fall within $1.3 to $2.0 range [www.digikey.com/product-search/en?FV=fff4001e%2Cfff8050d&ColumnSort=1000008]. The prices are much cheaper than the Capacitive Round Switch and DIY kit, although I am uncertain whether "Sensor ICs" equals sensors.

[paulo paniago]

The phone is a good example. Haha  : )

[Aziz Yemloul]

Hello Paulo!

I was thinking much more about speech synthesis. A kind of
steno-to-speech. Plover could push the strokes to eSpeak
http://espeak.sourceforge.net/ because this software is aware about
phonemes :

_________________________________________________________________
*Phoneme Input*
As well as plain text, phoneme mnemonics can be used in the text
input to espeak. They are enclosed within double square
brackets. Spaces are used To separate words and all stressed
syllables must be marked explicitly.

eg: espeak -v en "[[D,Is Iz sVm f@n'EtIk t'Ekst 'InpUt]]"

This command will speak: "This is some phonetic text input".
________________http://espeak.sourceforge.net/commands.html______

This way Plover will be multiplex. A person who cannot speak (i don't
know the correct term to say it in english) could use Plover to
communicate fluently with persons who don't know about sign language.

Thanks

[Mirabai Knight]

http://plover.stenoknight.com/2010/03/how-to-speak-with-your-fingers.html

(':

[paulo paniago]

Oh, I don’t think an instant chord-sound system would work well with my theory for Portuguese. That is because in it, we have one or two basic strokes that already make a finished word. After that, we can add a suffix that will change its verbal form, and sometimes that derived form can be so different than the basic. Unless you set some command to recognize that kind of conflict the sound would be perhaps confusing.

But for that, a common text-to-speech would work well I guess.

In the macbook you can just open the terminal and type: say

The mac will say everything you type after you press enter.

Once I used it to talk to my friends with a female voice. Haha, it was really fun. You can also set the speech to be really slow, which is also annoying…

It works with plover, but unfortunately I didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a great speed in steno to know how it would work on a real life situation.

[Brent Nesbitt]

Might be a bit of a problem when you type a multi-stroke word, in which the second stroke deletes and re-writes the first stroke.  Or even simple multi-stroke words - it would say the first translation, then the second (multi-stroke) translation.

--

[Steven Bhardwaj]

Perhaps there is a way to combine the ideas, although I'm sure this has been thought of before...

To address the timing/fluency problem with text-to-speech, you could have a system that

 - lets you chord real fast to cue/queue up a whole phrase or sentence in advance,

 - then allows you to "release" one syllable at a time of the regular text-to-speech to the speech processor

 - you could even adjust the tone and emphasis as you release the previously cued-up phrases

That way you could develop a real-time rhetorical style.

I imagine it would be like modern DJs with their SP-808s and other digital samplers. We're looking for a generation of walking deaf DJs. To quote the Beastie Boys, "Nothing sounds quite like an eight - oh - eight."

[Steven Bhardwaj]

(sorry for the split post...)

Perhaps a user could rapidly switch back and forth between multiple kinds of modes:

 - instant-talk modes where every stroke is immediately pronounced as a one-stroke word or as a raw syllable as Aziz describes

 - a queue up / release mode to enable access to the set of multi-stroke words

Some chords in either mode could be macros that trigger specific audio samples, enabling the SP-808 kind of functionality.

It seems to me that a big appeal of this is that the steno-plus-audio-sampler becomes a versatile and powerful DJ-ing tool, even more powerful in many ways than a human voice.

Like the flex-foot-cheetah, it might start attracting complaints that it makes the users too communicative, giving them too much of an advantage in social situations, which would be awesome...

[paulo paniago]

 

I don’t know how it would be for other theories, but for mine, if it spoke the word I chorded, when I was already typing a second word or ending a phrase – in example if it would be set to speak only after spaces or points – the risk of conflict would be minimal. (Remembering that plover gives the space before the word.  So any space in the text would probably mean that I was already doing a second word.)

It would work as a tool for the disabled and the delay would not be significant, but I don’t know how would it be with timing: If it could be set to make the speech sounds natural.

Perhaps the stenographer would set the rhythm by the speed he typed…

[Aziz Yemloul]

That's it

Sorry for repeating

[Josh Jordan]

How about a steno keyboard consisting of two 7" tablets with 10-finger multi-touch, such as the Nexus 7? You could define the natural position of your fingers resting on each screen as "home", so that each finger gets its own home position. For comfortable typing, the area of the screen corresponding to each key could then be defined relative to these home locations.

[Charles Shattuck]

https://www.adafruit.com/products/1602

looks pretty interesting. I ordered three and some copper tape to experiment with.

[Brandon Wiley]

You might try this as well: SparkFun Capacitive Touch Keypad

I actually has a capacitive touch full size keyboard, the TouchStream.

It's a fantastic keyboard and very ergonomic. Unfortunately, they were bought by Apple and are no longer made. All of those cool gestures you see on iPhones originated on the Touchstream.

So I'm all in favor of someone developing a new capacitive keyboard. I was hoping Apple would do it, but the closest thing they have is the iPad keyboard, which is not as good as it could be and not a general purpose keyboard.

--

[atkuilas]

> How about a steno keyboard consisting of two 7" tablets with 10-finger

> multi-touch, such as the Nexus 7?

Sounds like iStenoPad (www.istenopad.com) to me. The silicone keyboard overlay

does not provide good haptic feedback though.

> https://www.adafruit.com/products/1602

>

> looks pretty interesting. I ordered three and some copper tape to experiment with.

> You might try this as well: SparkFun Capacitive Touch Keypad

I have an idea of making the keys in Velcro (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velcro) so one can

stick them on whatever finger positions he'd like:

                                     [   Silicone layer    ]

                                     [Capacitive Sensor]

                                     [    Velcro hooks   ]

Here's some scenarios that I imagined:

1.) A roll-up keyboard: Nice portability + extra geekiness

2.) Wearable keyboard: Straps a Velcro loops strap on each thighs or why don't

weave it onto a jeans? T-shirt is cool too! Thinkgeek has something similar:

youtu.be/V6JjY-AKPIY

- The sensors can act as proximity sensors such that they only register when the

silicone layer is being pressed.

- Maybe magnets are more durable compare to Velcro.

- Will static electricity be a problem?