Stenotype Italia s.r.l. ::: Official web site :::

In order to understand STENOTYPE ITALIA’s activity in the field of computerized stenotyping it is better to start from the description of the working environment in which the system is used.

The “tool” is basically a word storage system at verbatim speed into a PC. In most instances the speaker doesn’t care about perfect pronunciation or about the speed. Very few people can speak in a language which is immediately usable in a written form. Examples are:
- Congresses, seminars, conferences;
- Public local administration meetings;
- Public Courts, Courts of Appeal, High Courts
- Parliaments and Senates;
- Editorial companies and editors’ offices;
- Lawyers and notaries;
- All situations where somebody speaks or reads.

Registration systems

     Today there are three ways of “word storaging” : stenography, voice registration on magnetic support or voice recognition software (at the moment the latter is not fully usable in all situations).
     Stenography and tape transcription do not allow a fast result because they both need a further step: the transcription of the steno notes or the audio transcription, which take quite a long time.
     Voice recognition systems encountered other kinds of problems, one of these is the fact that the software recognizes – not always in a perfect way - no more than one voice. They also need a dictionary of common words and the transcription phase is blocked or another word is written instead if the word is not included in the dictionary or refers to an individual name.
     The transcription phase takes quite a long time with traditional systems. It has been calculated that a one-hour speech needs five or six hours of transcription and this is why minutes are available with a delay which often creates problems. And this is the reason why Public Administration Offices have a delay of months in the publication of their minutes despite the fact that, by law, these should be available within a shorter time frame.

Utilization of Stenotype

In the above mentioned contexts STENOTYPE ITALIA computerized system is particularly useful. The concept on which the system is based permits the possibility of obtaining a corrected and printed text in a time similar or slightly longer than the end of the speech.

The text will be typed on the steno-machine and the computer will immediately, in real time mode, interpret what was written and the steno notes will be converted into correct words.

Subtitles and closed caption techniques

     At the end of the 90s attention towards handicapped people, hearing impaired in particular, has been significantly increased.
     In order to facilitate the social integration of the handicapped , the use of pre-prepared subtitles for films and TV programs has more than doubled. . It has been proved that on-line electronic stenotyping technique is the best or perhaps the only means of subtitling news and live TV programs.
     Computerized stenotyping has been successfully introduced as an avant-garde technique. It has been used in USA, UK, Canada, Italy, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil And many other countries are conducting thorough tests.

STENOTYPE ITALIA is working on the subtitling and closed caption fields in Italy, Spain, Argentina and in the near future in other countries thanks to the fact that its orthographic theory allows the development of other language databases.

The writers’ training

STENOTYPE ITALIA’s theory for steno writing machines, realized by Prof. Marcello Melani, has been applied to Stenograph machines; the same used in USA during the last 70 years and that are so often seen in films, especially when the scene takes place in courts (like in Perry Mason movies).

The character positioning on the keyboard has been modified in order to meet the requirements of orthographic languages and to facilitate the electronic stenotyping for the automatic word transcription.

The theory has also been tested at high speed e.g. during the Intersteno International Competitions, its participants always achieving excellent results among all partecipant.

Stenotype Italia has created the transcription Software (according to the method developed by Prof. Marcello Melani) most suitable to the orthographic languages. Italian, Spanish and Portuguese are languages written exactly as they are spoken, so that a vocabulary for all of the words is unnecessary.
The words are composed by typing the various syllables, and thus without generating “conflicts”. There exists only a vocabulary for codes and abbreviations, which can be extended at the discretion of each stenotypist. The functionality of this method has been demonstrated by almost twenty years of computerized stenotyping in Italian law courts, by real-time subtitling of television news broadcasts and by success in the latest editions of the “Intersteno Campionati” (stenotyping championship), with those using this method always among the winners in fast transcription contests.

The software of Stenotype’s system

STENOTYPE ITALIA’s theory is orthographic based and therefore is particularly indicated for all orthographic languages like Italian Spanish, Portuguese, Greek etc. It allows the transcription of any word, without the help of any dictionary.
It uses only a list of abbreviations according to the centennial experience of traditional stenographic systems and to the modern studies of the word frequency. It is important to emphasize that abbreviated words can also be written in full.

     Learning the theory is extremely easy. Manuals in different languages with “progressive” lessons are available together with lectures, examples, sentences and dictation. Manuals are considered by self study students to be rational and able to guarantee excellent results even without the assistance of a teacher.
      Learning duration is 80 hours for the theory and for the basic practise and about 500 hours to reach at least 80/100 words per minute according to the individual’s capability.
     A few hours are instead necessary to learn the machine’s functions and Winsteno ™ software.