this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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I think you're just being contrarian for no reason. The market for specialty input devices is much smaller compared to "normal" keyboards but it still exists and has become much more diverse over the past decade, with many new niche products being launched. This isn't even the first commercially available chorded keyboard. From the video, this particular iteration seems to be marketed towards mute people and I'm sure that they or people with other kinds of disabilities are probably glad to have any products at all available to aid them in daily tasks. Not every product or company needs to participate in a high volume market. Apparently, the chorded inputs can also be reprogrammed and it can work in a normal keyboard mode, which should make it more flexible than something designed purely for stenography.
Nope. Definitely got a reason, and it's stated. There have been countless reworks of keyboards, for example, that promise lots of benefits, but it's a problem that doesn't need solving for most people. What's a 30% increase in typing speed with a 200% learning curve going to do for most people? Not much. I've seen hundreds come and go throughout the years in engineering teams, and people always go back to the thing they learned on.
That being said, as someone else pointed out in this thread, this is essentially just a remix of stenography. They're trying to make it seem more useful than it is, which whatever, it's their product. The thing that is most problematic about this particular product is the cognitive dissonance of staring at someone like this guy making weird faces and not speaking, where you're actually listening to his phone.
Now, is this a solution for mute people? Quite possibly. Is it better than natural language conversational translation by a device in normal conversation? Not a chance.