I particularly enjoyed learning a version of shorthand. It’s an amazing speedup of note-taking, but it is designed to make written notes of verbal sounds; spelling is tossed aside!
On the other hand, it should be relatively easy to use (shorthand) written notes with an electronic device to be able to read back those notes through an (artificial) voice.
Our friend Charles Schulz, creator of the Peanuts comic strip, often used shorthand notes on his panels to indicate “secretarial” skills in action. They were accurate and amusing!
Back when I was a Clerk-Typist in the Civil Service, a much more impressive level of administrative employee was Secretary-Steno. You would think that converting a standard shorthand form into speech would be a fairly basic piece of programming. If you can do it with Japanese ...
Recent research has shown that students taking notes on a computer retain significantly less information and have worse comprehension than those who take notes by hand (either print or cursive). I wonder if that would be the same with shorthand. The very fastest typists don’t remember what they’ve typed.