Disemvowelment Mode?

Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke]

** Disemvowelment Mode

When I do voice dictation I can keep up but it is unpleasant for me because I
have to type as fast as I can non-stop. I want to do a good job with the
transcription (few to no corrections required) and keep my fingers, wrists,
and mental health in tact.

Here are some things I researched towards that goal and my take on them:

- Use voice dictation software. Problem is that it can only handle perfect
  American English. It chokes on everything else.
- Use a faster keyboard layout. My setup is QWERTY and I am not going
to change that.
- Use the "jump back 15" seconds button to reprocess sections and correct what
  you had written. That is a painful experience that interrupts your dictation
  flow.
- Use a speed-writing approach. Very interesting. Not Shorthand because it is
  handwritten. Not Stenography because it is special hardware. Gregg Shorthand
  might work (http://gregg.angelfishy.net/djbfs.shtml) although it seems to
  require some handwritten parts. Problem with all of these is that they are
  only readable by someone with training in that approach. My dictation need a
  chance of someone else reading them, a good chance.
- Disemvowel is a portmanteau for vowel and disembowel—removing all of the
  vowels from a word for example
  "Tell me about that new xylophone they purchased for the country club"
  "Tll m bt tht nw xylphn thy prchsd fr th cntry clb". This is nice because it
  is simple and consistent. Your writing program can enforce this for you.
  Human thought is not required. Those are its strengths and weaknesses
  though—sometimes it is painful to read when it doesn't need to be. For
  example
  "Knock one more time then tell me yes or no"
  "Knck n mr tm thn tll m ys r n"
  is arguably just fine, or maybe not. My gt flng s tht thr s
  smthng bttr, vn f nly jst lttl bt.
- When I sit down and try to only use vowels I can do a better job then a
  program. I know that sometimes using a vowel makes total sense. For example
  "See me" becomes either a bad "S m" or OK "Se me" when I do it. The
  simplistic disemvowelment approach won't work here, and, that isn't
  surprising. It looks like there are some simple rules to make the process
  better. For example if the word is only two letters and starts with a vowel
  then it might be a good idea to leave it there. Another one is that if two
  words next to each other are converted to single letters next to each other
  then maybe they shouldn't be converted at all. There are things to consider
  here. I don't know what they are or what works well. But I think that this
  is part of the story.

Here is the mental space for the writer I'm describing here

- Groks the approach of removing vowels, but not always, because it needs to
  be readable.

The goal then is how to let the user just dictate and have to mode kind of
make things a little more correct after they are written. Sometimes the writer
can't do the mental translation fast enough and it would be easier to just
type the entire word. This is the situation for this mode: to standardize the
auto shorthand that keeps it true to how a human would do it.

What I want to do here is to make a mode that will help me a writer avoid
using vowels. The write would be typing along, making a point to avoid using
vowels. But sometimes determine that they are necessary, so it has to let the
writer type them in. The problem is that the writer won't always get it right
while trying to type fast. As the user is writing, the mode would look back at
the preview few words while it decides what to do with them.

It seems like there are a few ways to help the writer here:

1. If it sees a word with vowels in it, and if you disemvoweled a word that it
   only had 1 char remaining, then don't disemvovwel it.
2. If you see a word starts with a vowel, then leave it, but remove all
   the other vowels following.

Right now my ideas are not formed. They won't be until I try out the mode. I
haven been typing like this manually and it works fine, I'm just tired of
stopping and fixing the dictation because it doesn't look right (e.g. single
letter words). It is a break in the flow and it really hurts. Reading about
shorthand and also how people use abbreviations there are a lot of
opportunities to speed things up. For example for 'and' use '.' Instead of
'nd' and '/' to close a sentence. Yes definitely but that is out of scope here
for sake of keeping it simple.

From what I read this problem seems like auto-completion, backwards, for one
or two words, with no user interaction. I got this by reading about
auto completion functionality in one of the modes. So that is where I would
probably start.

What do you think? Where is a good place to start? Is there sometime like this
out there that I missed?

Thank you for spending your time on reading this, and thoughts and feedback.

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Stefan Monnier]

Hi,

I don't touch type and never have gotten anywhere close to dictation, so
I'm probably not the best to give you ideas, but I just wanted to point
out that I don't understand why you'd find it desirable for the software
to remove the vowels that you did type.  From what I understand the
purpose is to speed up typing, so you want to reduce the amount of
typing that takes place rather than the amount of chars that get written
in the file, so a "Disemvowelment Mode" seems like it operates at the
wrong place.


        Stefan


Grant Rettke <grant@wisdomandwonder.com> writes:

> ** Disemvowelment Mode
>
> When I do voice dictation I can keep up but it is unpleasant for me because I
> have to type as fast as I can non-stop. I want to do a good job with the
> transcription (few to no corrections required) and keep my fingers, wrists,
> and mental health in tact.
>
> Here are some things I researched towards that goal and my take on them:
>
> - Use voice dictation software. Problem is that it can only handle perfect
>   American English. It chokes on everything else.
> - Use a faster keyboard layout. My setup is QWERTY and I am not going
> to change that.
> - Use the "jump back 15" seconds button to reprocess sections and correct what
>   you had written. That is a painful experience that interrupts your dictation
>   flow.
> - Use a speed-writing approach. Very interesting. Not Shorthand because it is
>   handwritten. Not Stenography because it is special hardware. Gregg Shorthand
>   might work (http://gregg.angelfishy.net/djbfs.shtml) although it seems to
>   require some handwritten parts. Problem with all of these is that they are
>   only readable by someone with training in that approach. My dictation need a
>   chance of someone else reading them, a good chance.
> - Disemvowel is a portmanteau for vowel and disembowel—removing all of the
>   vowels from a word for example
>   "Tell me about that new xylophone they purchased for the country club"
>   "Tll m bt tht nw xylphn thy prchsd fr th cntry clb". This is nice because it
>   is simple and consistent. Your writing program can enforce this for you.
>   Human thought is not required. Those are its strengths and weaknesses
>   though—sometimes it is painful to read when it doesn't need to be. For
>   example
>   "Knock one more time then tell me yes or no"
>   "Knck n mr tm thn tll m ys r n"
>   is arguably just fine, or maybe not. My gt flng s tht thr s
>   smthng bttr, vn f nly jst lttl bt.
> - When I sit down and try to only use vowels I can do a better job then a
>   program. I know that sometimes using a vowel makes total sense. For example
>   "See me" becomes either a bad "S m" or OK "Se me" when I do it. The
>   simplistic disemvowelment approach won't work here, and, that isn't
>   surprising. It looks like there are some simple rules to make the process
>   better. For example if the word is only two letters and starts with a vowel
>   then it might be a good idea to leave it there. Another one is that if two
>   words next to each other are converted to single letters next to each other
>   then maybe they shouldn't be converted at all. There are things to consider
>   here. I don't know what they are or what works well. But I think that this
>   is part of the story.
>
> Here is the mental space for the writer I'm describing here
>
> - Groks the approach of removing vowels, but not always, because it needs to
>   be readable.
>
> The goal then is how to let the user just dictate and have to mode kind of
> make things a little more correct after they are written. Sometimes the writer
> can't do the mental translation fast enough and it would be easier to just
> type the entire word. This is the situation for this mode: to standardize the
> auto shorthand that keeps it true to how a human would do it.
>
> What I want to do here is to make a mode that will help me a writer avoid
> using vowels. The write would be typing along, making a point to avoid using
> vowels. But sometimes determine that they are necessary, so it has to let the
> writer type them in. The problem is that the writer won't always get it right
> while trying to type fast. As the user is writing, the mode would look back at
> the preview few words while it decides what to do with them.
>
> It seems like there are a few ways to help the writer here:
>
> 1. If it sees a word with vowels in it, and if you disemvoweled a word that it
>    only had 1 char remaining, then don't disemvovwel it.
> 2. If you see a word starts with a vowel, then leave it, but remove all
>    the other vowels following.
>
> Right now my ideas are not formed. They won't be until I try out the mode. I
> haven been typing like this manually and it works fine, I'm just tired of
> stopping and fixing the dictation because it doesn't look right (e.g. single
> letter words). It is a break in the flow and it really hurts. Reading about
> shorthand and also how people use abbreviations there are a lot of
> opportunities to speed things up. For example for 'and' use '.' Instead of
> 'nd' and '/' to close a sentence. Yes definitely but that is out of scope here
> for sake of keeping it simple.
>
> From what I read this problem seems like auto-completion, backwards, for one
> or two words, with no user interaction. I got this by reading about
> auto completion functionality in one of the modes. So that is where I would
> probably start.
>
> What do you think? Where is a good place to start? Is there sometime like this
> out there that I missed?
>
> Thank you for spending your time on reading this, and thoughts and feedback.

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>
> Date: Mon, 13 May 2019 15:08:37 -0400
> 
> I don't touch type and never have gotten anywhere close to dictation, so
> I'm probably not the best to give you ideas, but I just wanted to point
> out that I don't understand why you'd find it desirable for the software
> to remove the vowels that you did type.  From what I understand the
> purpose is to speed up typing, so you want to reduce the amount of
> typing that takes place rather than the amount of chars that get written
> in the file, so a "Disemvowelment Mode" seems like it operates at the
> wrong place.

If you switch to a language whose writing system is of the "abjad"
variety, you get your "disemvowelment" for free.

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 2:09 PM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> I just wanted to point out that I don't understand why you'd find it desirable for the software
> to remove the vowels that you did type.

That is my fault: I didn't share why.

When I am typing, most of the time I can keep up and more or less
apply the simple rules
I am trying to follow. The problem is when I get distracted (or tired,
or the speaker goes to fast
and I can't keep up) and I just start typing word-for-word. In those
cases, I don't want to have to go
back over the document to clean it up. That is why I was thinking
about the mode "looking back at the
last two words or so" to do the right thing to them.

Having talked through this now, there is certainly a case for not
doing this in a mode  -_-  :).

Thanks for your feedback.

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 2:30 PM Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> If you switch to a language whose writing system is of the "abjad"
> variety, you get your "disemvowelment" for free.

Fascinating. Thanks for sharing that!

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Stefan Monnier]

>> I just wanted to point out that I don't understand why you'd find it
>> desirable for the software to remove the vowels that you did type.
> That is my fault: I didn't share why.
>
> When I am typing, most of the time I can keep up and more or less
> apply the simple rules I am trying to follow.  The problem is when
> I get distracted (or tired, or the speaker goes to fast and I can't
> keep up) and I just start typing word-for-word.

Hmm... so you go faster when you type "word for word" (i.e. when you
type more)?  What's the benefit of only typing the consonants, then?

> In those cases, I don't want to have to go back over the document to
> clean it up.  That is why I was thinking about the mode "looking back
> at the last two words or so" to do the right thing to them.

You can also do that as a separate processing step, rather than doing it
"on the fly", right?


        Stefan

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 8:33 PM Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
> >> I just wanted to point out that I don't understand why you'd find it
> >> desirable for the software to remove the vowels that you did type.
> > That is my fault: I didn't share why.
> >
> > When I am typing, most of the time I can keep up and more or less
> > apply the simple rules I am trying to follow.  The problem is when
> > I get distracted (or tired, or the speaker goes to fast and I can't
> > keep up) and I just start typing word-for-word.
>
> Hmm... so you go faster when you type "word for word" (i.e. when you
> type more)?  What's the benefit of only typing the consonants, then?

When I type, I have my eyes closed, and touch-type, so the typing
speed is always
the same, it is fast (way faster than when I first learned to type a
long, long time ago).
It doesn't seem to be a limiting factor for me because I've been doing
it for a long time.

The issue I'm trying to manage here my mental stamina. I call that
my mental budget. For example if I'm going to dictate a 2h lecture
then I have a budget of
100 Euros

When I type word-for-word it is very accurate. In my mind I hear the
words, and see them,
and type them out as correctly as possible. It makes for dictation
that is very close to perfect.
It has a high cost though per word to get that accuracy. Say that it
in total costs me 87 Euros.

That doesn't leave much room for issues. I don't have any room in the
budget for noise or light distractions, or losing
attention to the speaker, or having a difficult time understanding
what the speaker just said
(either the pronunciation or the word or idea itself). Everything has
to go nearly perfectly. Those remaining
13 Euros handle some error but not much. When I type word-for-word in
this scenario I'll
spend nearly 100 Euros. Even if I spend less, it leaves my bank
account pretty low. That makes
corrections difficult, I'm out of mental budget by the end of the
lecture. Even lectures in the next
session or day become more difficult for me. This is my experience not
theory. My goal is to minimize
spending of my mental budget.

To answer your question, when I only type consonants, I "see less
letters" in my mind, and also,
I don't have to be so worried about getting them written down
perfectly. When I transcribe with that
approach, and see words in my mind such as "the, like, every" it
probably doesn't need such
attention to details because "t, lk, evy" are just as easy to
recognize when you are reading the entire
sentence. It uses less of my mental budget to do this. I don't have
"think so hard".
So, why am I even talking about typing word-for-word in the first place?

When I get fatigued or don't catch a word or get distracted or just
don't know how I want to or
am going to simplify something and have to really think about it then
it is more mentally taxing for me.
The easiest thing to do in that case is to just type it word-for-word.
For example an important word
like "equanimity" pops up. The word is to "different" for me, it is
interesting, not boring or simple, it
makes me think. It takes too much mental budget to think about it for
one or two seconds to find a
simplification that is good enough. My immediate reaction is that I
don't have a simplification for it, so I will just
type it. That is the only way that I can keep up (later on I would see
that "eqnmty" would be fine).

The problem is that the surprises start to push the budget down and it
is not a linear drop. As I get more
fatigued my performance gets worse and the slow downs start to
snowball. Of course there will always
be interesting, not common or trivial words, and that is where I would
want a mode to modify them
at that moment. These aren't surprising cases, just normal ones. I
want the mode to make
it easier every place that it can.

> > In those cases, I don't want to have to go back over the document to
> > clean it up.  That is why I was thinking about the mode "looking back
> > at the last two words or so" to do the right thing to them.
>
> You can also do that as a separate processing step, rather than doing it
> "on the fly", right?

Yes absolutely.

If I could automate it though I want that correction step performed
immediately for two reasons. #1 "it will look how it should look" at
that
moment because inevitably I will have a moment here and there to
review what I wrote down and it would be easier for me to
see it in its final form. #2 my mental budget runs out very very
quickly so if I don't have to do a separate step it will save funds
for the
next lecture or day.

I feel like it is important to share a /little/ bit of the context
here... I'm not pursuing this "just for the fun of it" or
for words-per-minute bragging rights or just making note taking sort
of easier (each of which I endorse 100% in their own right!).
But rather it is to implement a compensation strategy for a cognitive
processing deficit that a lot of people unexpectedly come to face
today.
That is why I keep talking about the budget and sort of saving every
Euro wherever I can. It isn't a hyper-optimization for sake of
optimization.
It is trying to manage a reduced mental budget in a way that lets you
participate in the life activities that you were able to before.
Every single penny matters here. After doing a week of learning it
will take another week just to recover from that even if it
goes "perfectly".

Based on my research, that list of stuff is the best potential
approach out there: there just wasn't anything else out there.
That is why I am relying so much on my experience and imagination
here. There is probably a lot more to it.
For example, I just realized that I never considered how to handle
proper nouns uugghh!

My motivation is huge. When you are in this situation switching to
Colemak or learning stenography just isn't an option.
A lot of people can benefit from something here, millions.
Specifically in the situation where you can perform at
this level if you heavily budget. It probably doesn't sound like a big
deal, but if it could be done then it would
help out so much. Just need to figure out what that something looks
like first! :)

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Paul W. Rankin]

On Tue, May 14 2019, Grant Rettke wrote:

> The issue I'm trying to manage here my mental stamina. I call that my 
> mental budget. For example if I'm going to dictate a 2h lecture then I 
> have a budget of 100 Euros

> My goal is to minimize spending of my mental budget.

I used to work as a journalist, needing to transcribe interviews, and 
now I still need to transcribe TV postproduction scripts. Everyone is 
different, but I found that the mental stamina is taxed not by the speed 
of the recording/typing but by the sense that you don't control the 
flow, i.e. when you're listening and typing simultaneously, you have a 
constant requirement to "keep up" with the recording.

I found it much easier to separate these tasks. So you listen to a 
sentence or two, pause, type what you heard, repeat. This way you retain 
a sense of control of your flow; each task is much easier because you 
focus on listening, then focus on typing accurately.

You'll likely even find you get through a recording much faster because 
you can speed up the playback to ~200% and still have an accurate 
listening comprehension of what is being said.

I don't think spending your time creating what will likely be a complex 
elisp program is going to be in your best interests.

--
https://www.paulwrankin.com

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Joost Kremers]

On Tue, May 14 2019, Grant Rettke wrote:
> When I am typing, most of the time I can keep up and more or 
> less apply the simple rules I am trying to follow. The problem 
> is when I get distracted (or tired, or the speaker goes to fast 
> and I can't keep up) and I just start typing word-for-word. In 
> those cases, I don't want to have to go back over the document 
> to clean it up. That is why I was thinking about the mode 
> "looking back at the last two words or so" to do the right thing 
> to them.

The thing that I still don't understand, is why you would want to 
convert the document to shorthand at all? Isn't the purpose in the 
end to have a legible written version of the talk? Why would it 
matter when some of the words are written in full?

> Having talked through this now, there is certainly a case for 
> not
> doing this in a mode  -_-  :).

Well, in any case you'd need to write a function that can 
disemvowel a word. You can call this function manually (or wrap it 
in another function that runs over a region/the buffer), or you 
could run it in an (idle) timer or something similar. If you use a 
timer, there's no reason AFAICT to *not* create a minor mode for 
it.



--
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Eric S Fraga]

What about using abbrev-mode: put in the full words as the abbreviation
and the disemvowelled word as the word to insert in the buffer?
-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 27.0.50 & org 9.2.3 on Debian buster/sid

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Emanuel Berg]

Stefan Monnier wrote:

> I don't touch type

Ha ha ha :D

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke]

On Mon, May 13, 2019 at 11:17 PM Paul W. Rankin <hello@paulwrankin.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 14 2019, Grant Rettke wrote:
> I found it much easier to separate these tasks. So you listen to a
> sentence or two, pause, type what you heard, repeat. This way you retain
> a sense of control of your flow; each task is much easier because you
> focus on listening, then focus on typing accurately.
>
> You'll likely even find you get through a recording much faster because
> you can speed up the playback to ~200% and still have an accurate
> listening comprehension of what is being said.

Thanks for sharing that experience.

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Grant Rettke]

On Tue, May 14, 2019 at 3:02 AM Joost Kremers <joostkremers@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> The thing that I still don't understand, is why you would want to
> convert the document to shorthand at all?
> (AND)
> Why would it
> matter when some of the words are written in full?

I feel like it is easier to read when 100% is shortened instead of 3/4
that I shortened
and 1/4 that I didn't. I would only convert something like that.

> Isn't the purpose in the
> end to have a legible written version of the talk?

From what I have tried so far the shorthand version is easy to read but yea if
I wrote it all perfectly like Paul explained then I would never convert it.


>  If you use a timer, there's no reason AFAICT to *not* create a minor mode for
> it.

Good point, thanks!

Re: Disemvowelment Mode?

[Joost Kremers]

On Wed, May 15 2019, Grant Rettke wrote:
>>  If you use a timer, there's no reason AFAICT to *not* create a 
>>  minor mode for it.
>
> Good point, thanks!

Another radical way you could do this: create a major(!) mode 
which derives from text-mode but unbinds all vowel keys. That way 
you can't even type vowel...

You could come up with some way to type vowels in those cases that 
you do want to have a vowel (e.g., when a word starts with one). 
Perhaps bind the capital vowels to a command that inserts the 
lower-case variant (so typing `A` would actually insert 'a' in the 
buffer), if your shorthand involves not using capital letters. Or 
create a command that asks for a vowel and inserts it, and bind it 
to a key, say `=`. Then you'd have to type `=a` to actually insert 
'a' into the buffer. (You may be able to use a custom input method 
to do that, actually). 

--
Joost Kremers
Life has its moments