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Comment by jcoffland | Hacker News Reader

A trick I use to "read" books much faster is to feed them through Google's TTS but set a much higher than normal read speed. I call it robotting a book.

It takes some getting used to and requires more focus but it's very efficient in terms of information dump. I've been able to increase the speed over time. My wife thinks I'm crazy. I use headphones.

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I do this with informational youtube videos. I crank the speed to 1.5-2x depending on how fast the presenter is talking, but I push it to the point where I feel like I'm just barely keeping up and I try to get faster over time where I'm setting more and more videos to 2x rather than 1.5x.

Use youtube-dl and you can train yourself to go past 2x pretty easily as well.

I use the "video speed controller" extension to set the speed in increments of 0.1x. Works on any HTML5 player (netflix, youtube, most random websites).

Nice, I figured I'd probably get some of these suggestions posting this on HN, thanks! I'll check these out. I've been meaning to find something that will let me go past 2x.

Ya I started doing this while on a bicycling tour and on Air planes. Both situations I can give my brain lots of attention on absorbing the information at a faster rate because my other information inputs are not as busy.

The air plane is easiest for 2* speed because I can close my eyes which helps me focus on the sound even more.

I use Audible though.

Blind people do this as a matter of course. With practice one can understand absurdly fast reading.

There's a blind developer giving a talk on Visual Studio accessibility here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94swlF55tVc - and you can hear examples of him using text to speech starting at about 0m 45s but he doesn't say how fast.

How do you do this? How fast is the speech? 800wpm? Faster?

Currently I use FBReader TTS on Android. I'm not sure what the wpm is. I should test it with a stopwatch.

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