Why stenography is phonetic

Why is stenography phonetic anyway?

Written English is very different from spoken English; its complicated spelling and archaic rules help us to very quickly recognise words like we recognise faces, but it makes transcribing speech quickly a nontrivial task. But computers can do a lot of the work for us. If we can tell the computer what was spoken in an unambiguous way, then we can have it do the complicated writing for us. Phonetic steno theories allow us to communicate with the computer in that way.

Spoken ambiguity

Part of the stenographer's job is to resolve ambiguity. For example heterographic homophones (way, weigh) and word boundary errors (a way, away), or even a combination thereof (await, a weight).