For what it's worth, I'm not sure if it is more ergonomic. Typing on a steno machine began to hurt my wrists. I've never had a problem typing on my keyboard, though.

Whoops, I meant 520 hours per year.

I'm sure it's possible for some people, but I'd say that in general, it's going to take you well over 200 hours to get to 180 words per minute. I know people who spent, I don't know, I'll be conservative and say 10 hours a week and couldn't get to 180 after 2 years (520ish hours). In reality they were probably doing at least 20 hours a week.

I was a stenographer for a short while, I could type at 225+ words per minute with something like 98% accuracy. Please believe me when I say that this is a foolish project, no matter what their reasoning.

To start with, Stenography isn't realistic for the average person who wants to increase their typing speed (ie: secretaries, journalists, writers, and especially not coders). I can't even express how hard it is to reach 225 words per minute. The goal is to have a student get to that point in 2 years, but I ran into plenty of people that took 3 years, and one or two that took 4. This is with them learning it for a career, not as some side hobby, so they were highly motivated. I think some people's brains are better wired to become good at stenography, and there's really not much you can do about it if you're not one of those people.

When you're trying to learn Stenography, the focus is all about speed, speed, speed, and accuracy can come later. You're taught a theory on how to write words which is designed to let you write quickly and without conflict (the theories are all phonetic based, so when I say conflicts, I mean something like: how to write "cell", and how to write "sell"), and these theories are basically languages in their own right. The word dime in the theory I learned, for example, is written TKAOEUPL. Why? Because speed. This translates to D (tk together is D) AOEU (long I) PL (M).

What I'm trying to get across here is that you want to shorten everything down into one keystroke, because speed is the most important thing. People would abbreviate entire sentences down to one key stroke. So while you and I might have been taught the same theory, I wouldn't be able to read what you wrote, and you wouldn't be able to read what I wrote. In order to reach that mythical 225, you need to pick up abbreviations, steal stuff from other theories (usually unknowingly), or my favorite, make up your own abbreviations on the fly and then struggle to remember what the hell that meant later. Not only are you taught a language, you take that language and morph it into a language of your own. This is very error prone, leads to you guessing based on context what you meant when you wrote some crazy combination of keys, and it requires countless hours of building your dictionary so the computer will recognize WAO as window, for example.

The marketing talk is that you can write 225 words per minute, but the reality is that you're writing 225 words per minute, and then spending quite a lot of time deciphering what you wrote, fixing typos, adding in grammar, and adding in formatting. This is all a pain in the ass, and in my mind makes it entirely unrealistic for someone such as a journalist or writer. In the case of programmers, I can't imagine how it would even work at all.

That's for the average guy. I think the project is also pretty foolish if their goal is to transform the industry. Stenography is a dead end in terms of a career. It's going to be automated. There's no reason for someone to have to sit and type what he or she hears using this ridiculous system. If they want to transform the industry, they should focus on making speech transcription software better, because that's where the future is. The companies in the market now who are selling stenographer software and equipment need to die because they're abusing their position of power and overcharging for their products, but this isn't the way to do it.