Shorthand Dictation


About

This website is a tool for generating dictation for the purpose of practicing shorthand.

When I started learning shorthand, following along to an old manual, I quickly tired of recording myself dictate the book's exercises at various speeds, so I wrote a script to generate the desired dictation for me. For a year the program sat as a personal tool on my computer, before I had the idea to code it into a web application for public use.

While there is a vast volume of recordings available online which were made for the sole purpose of taking shorthand dictation, there has been no satisfactory method of producing one's own practice material, which I think makes for a more interesting learning experience—you can take dictation of the Gettysburg Address, for example, or a passage from a novel. Existing text-to-speech software slows down speech undiscriminatingly so that words become slurred and unintelligible, which is particularly unsuitable for the beginner who has to practice at low speeds. This website addresses that problem by lengthening the pauses between individual words instead of reducing speaking rate as a whole. It is a text-to-speech software specifically geared toward shorthand practice.

I am a college student studying computer science. Shorthand features among my various interests, some others of which are philosophy, history, and writing.