Court reporters and close-captioners have been “typing” at the high rates of speech (up to 255 words per minute) for a long time. They aren't really typing in the sense we normally mean it; instead they are recording the sounds of speech – the phonemes – using a special stenography machine (basically, a typewriter for phonemes). Long ago stenographers developed a way of writing these sounds by hand. In both cases, the end result is basically a list of sounds, which the stenographer must then manually convert to typed text (at normal typing speeds!).
In the late 1970s, several companies developed computer-based systems that sped this process up enormously by automating that last step of converting the list of sounds into typed text. One of these companies (Xscribe) was based in San Diego, and about a million years ago, I worked for them as a hardware and software engineer. It was a very interesting place to work at the time, as they were pushing the envelope on what you could do with a microcomputer.
Today there's very little trace remaining of Xscribe. The company struggled on into the '90s, went public, but then seems to have disappeared. Google the name and you can find people selling spare parts (apparently those systems are still being used!), but that's about it. The domain name xscribe.com now shows the page for Stenograph Corporation, who was Xscribe's main competitor in the period I was there ('81 to '82). I found conflicting news stories about possible acquisition of Xscribe by Stenograph or its parent company Quixote. In any case, Xscribe appears to have failed in the end.
Now there's an open source program that does basically the same thing that Xscribe's (very expensive) hardware and software did. It uses a $45 gaming keyboard as its input device, a normal PC, and the free open-source software package named Plover...
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