Plover is open-source software designed to replace expensive, proprietary stenography software–the sort of software used by court reporters, medical transcriptionists, and others.
Before there was Plover, there was deposition software, often called computer-aided transcription (CAT) software. While this software is very useful for stenographers making depositions, it is not well-fitted to other purposes. It is sandboxed, proprietary, and often bloated. Plover is a small, slick Python application that you run in the background. It acts as a translator to read steno input from your keyboard or steno machine and then emulates keystrokes. The programs you use can’t tell that you’re using steno.
This means that you can use Plover to chat on Facebook, write in Microsoft Word, browse the web, control your media, use a terminal, fire off keyboard shortcuts, open and close programs, navigate with arrow keys, write code, or anything else you could do with a regular keyboard, but at potentially much greater speeds!