Realtime is the skill that most changes a reporter’s career — it commands premium fees, wins the best work, and is increasingly what clients expect. It’s also intimidating to start. Here’s a practical on-ramp for 2026.

What realtime is (and why it pays more)

Realtime means your steno is translated to readable English instantly, as you write, and streamed to others — attorneys at a deposition, a judge, or a CART consumer. There’s no safety net of post-editing while it’s happening; the text has to be clean enough to read live.

That difficulty is exactly why it pays: attorneys can search and annotate testimony in the moment, and accessibility consumers get immediate access. Realtime is typically billed as a separate per-page fee on top of the transcript, and it’s a major driver of top reporter income.

The gear

You need three things working together reliably:

A steno writer with realtime output — a modern professional machine (e.g., current Stenograph or ProCAT writers) with a solid realtime connection.
A connection to the attorneys’ devices — these days usually over local Wi-Fi/router or a realtime-viewing app, with a wired serial/USB option as backup. Always have a backup connection.
CAT software configured for realtime output and streaming.

Reliability beats novelty here. A dropped connection mid-deposition is a professional emergency, so practiced, redundant setups win.

Prepping your dictionary for realtime

Realtime exposes every weakness in your dictionary. To get clean output live:

Resolve conflicts so common homophones translate correctly without thinking.
Build and drill briefs for the names, terms, and phrases in this case — prep the caption, parties, experts, and jargon before you sit down.
Reduce untranslates — the goal is text an attorney can read without you stopping to fix it.
Practice writing for the reader, not just for your later edit.

Realtime readiness is mostly dictionary work done before the job, not heroics during it.

CART vs. deposition realtime

The skill overlaps, but the settings differ:

Deposition / legal realtime streams to attorneys and feeds the official transcript.
CART (Communication Access Realtime Translation) provides realtime text for accessibility — classrooms, meetings, events — where the consumer is reading as communication, not building a legal record. Remote CART has widened where this work lives.

Many reporters do both; each sharpens the other.

A practice path to realtime-ready

Get your speed and accuracy solid first — realtime amplifies whatever your raw writing is.
Clean your dictionary relentlessly; treat conflicts as bugs.
Write realtime for yourself daily until your untranslate rate is low.
Offer realtime in low-stakes settings before high-stakes depositions.
Standardize a redundant tech setup you can deploy without thinking.

Get there, and you’ve added the highest-leverage service in the profession.

Tools that keep up

Realtime is demanding enough without fighting your software. DepoStack is being built by people who’ve lived that — so the tech gets out of your way and you can focus on the record. Join the founding-member waitlist to follow along.