Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training

One major thing this approach looses is the inherent non-linearity of text. If I miss a fact and want to back up a bit, or want to pause for a moment and think about something, I can (when reading) without even thinking about it. Even if this approach is faster overall, it makes reading more like listening to audio or watching a video; it's a big pain to rewind or pause.

Secondly, this is actually slower than true speed reading or skimming because it forces you to read every word. Truly accomplished readers will often read material at a very superficial level, only dipping in and reading consistently when they encounter a novel concept. Essentially, they can use semantic compression to increase their reading speed by only bothering to read what they find to be relevant. This operates on every level, from the page to the chapter to the paragraph to the sentence. It isn't perfect, of course, but it's always possible to back up if one finds crucial information has been missed.

Finally, even though this tool is truly excellent for breaking the subvocalization habit that hampers most slow readers, once you learn how to read without subvocalizing it becomes a bit redundant. For example, looking at Spritz, I cranked the speed to 500. It felt pretty good, like I was reading fast. Then I went and took a traditional reading speed test and clocked in at 700wpm, with 95% comprehension. So I'm not sure my overall speed is better with Spritz.

That said, I'll probably keep coming back to this or technologies like this, now that I'm aware of them. They seem a really good way to force oneself into the speed-reading mindset - I have a feeling that doing this for 60 seconds before a normal reading session would improve reading speed substantially.

* My eyes muscles feel oddly relaxed while reading, whereas in contrast I need I mental focus to understand the text. It's really hypnotic, in a weird but not unpleasant way.

* Keeping focused on a single point for minutes, I get a disconcerting tunnel effect. As my brain hasn't seen my surroundings for too long, it stops recomposing it, and that makes me conscious of how small my precise vision area is. This also contributes to the hypnotic effect of that thing.

* It absolutely needs an intuitive throttle. My optimal speed varies continuously, because the information density varies a lot within a single text, and some information can be perceived to have widely different levels of relevance for different readers. I'd probably like the speed to be controlled by the mouse's y axis.

* Quick indexing: I want to easily jump anywhere in the page, not read it sequentially.

For years 500 words per minute (approximately one printed page per minute) has been my baseline speed for most of the material I read in English. I read slower in my second languages, of course. Back in my college days, when I wanted to make sure I wasn't being slowed down in my studies by a too-slow reading speed, I read a lot of books from the university library about reading skill improvement, and several jointly suggested that improving vocabulary improves reading speed. I took a course about English vocabulary based on Latin and Greek word roots, and that did seem to help for years afterward in both reading speed and reading comprehension.

[1] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

AFTER EDIT, TO REPLY TO QUESTION:

In this context, "second languages" is a quite normal designation for language(s) acquired after one's native language(s) were acquired. My user profile lists most of mine. I read best in Chinese and in German, besides English.

Science does not work by giving loads of examples of why the approach "should" work better than traditional reading, substantiated by intuition and "80%"-"20%" figures given with no reliable source. It should instead be validated by experiments.

Here, it is simple enough to validate the approach experimentally: select texts and create simple multiple choice assignments to evaluate reading comprehension, and compare the performance of your method versus traditional reading on random people. The exact protocol would require a bit of care to avoid biases, but it wouldn't be that hard to do.

Without a study of this kind, this is just a gimmicky way to read, backed by some people's belief that it is more efficient.

(Another comment: the example French text looks like machine translation, which makes it hard to understand.)

As someone who tried using spreeder for a while, I can say that your retention is quite a bit lower than normal reading, especially when reading complicated texts, since you loose contextual clues (your brain is really good at doing look-aheads for clues).

But the French translation is gibberish!! This is unprofessional and insulting. If you can't be bothered to hire a professional translator, please don't offer content in that language at all.

I tried multiple times to read the example, but would stumble to comprehend the shape of a word or two, lose my way, and have to rewind back to the beginning.

Overall it felt considerably slower and more broken, less rhythmic. My comprehension felt lower, I felt I spent far more time comprehending the shapes of the words rather than the totality of the meaning expressed.

I know my eyesight is bad, that I am long-sighted and colour blind, but this was a painful and slow reading experience.

Some words took so much concentration to figure out that I'd forgotten the words that preceded it, and lost context.

Without the ability to rewind this or to see a larger context, I would avoid this like the plague.

Clearly an outlier as everyone else is raving.

1) With the overload of information, we've adapted to skim not only sentences but skip over entire sections of content because we instantly perceive them as not having valuable information. Factoring this in, I would think our reading speeds are over 1000 wpm. I got the gist of the page by skimming the first 2 paragraphs and skipping the rest as it was extraneous.

2) limiting it to 1 word at a time is counter to how most speed reading programs teach to extend the width of how many words you can read simultaneously. Some people can grok the meaning of an entire line of text without (or minimal) saccading. Their eyes just go straight down the middle of the page. It would be nice if the app helped "train" you to be able to increase your reading width without loss of comprehension. I might actually use it then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_movements_in_reading

Eye Movements in Reading, Rayner (1983): http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Lx51Brw60cMC&pg=PA79&lpg...

I hacked together a crude JavaScript implementation in a few minutes just for kicks:

https://github.com/Miserlou/OpenSpritz

..hopefully we'll see more of this stuff everywhere.

Good work, please thrive!

http://jsfiddle.net/P7c3s/

http://vanniktech.de/SpeedReader/

I would like to get some feedback.

This is amazing. How do I make it pause?

This seems to be the advantage of text 'being there' - I can leave and come back. I want to do the same with Spritz.

I also think that a visual cue that lets me know where I am in the content would make me feel more satisfied. A bit like when using Sublime the space in the top right that gives you the context of where you are in the document.

I'd love to see myself racing through a document. I think it would convey your value proposition even more too.

Good luck. It's great. J

I see two processes, my eyes see the stream of word, but I read in a different order when overwhelmed, or at least I cant tell what order words came in if the context allow for both.

When trying 500 wpm I'm lagging behind about 0.25s regularly, but, as they say, if you let it be and relax you can keep the pipeline going. I even feel a slight pressure in my upper brain, just a little, no cramp, a slight dizziness. Even more relaxing.

So the scanning part of reading is actually a bottleneck ? I feel like I'm learning how asian people feel when they read.

In 2006, Volkswagen made an ad in the States for the Golf GTI and called it "turbo cojones". Apparently, they didn't know that "cojones" means testicles. They didn't do their research.

While spritz is a seemingly normal German word (spritzer means splash and the logo shows a water drop), the phrase I was spritzing is actually an extremely bad branding choice. It's usually said in a specific context and means:

I was ejaculating.

Edit: It could also mean I spilled the tomato sauce, but it's still poor.

You might as well patent the alphabet, I don't mind. Albeit mostly because I don't live in the US. I don't see how your online service will be able to compete with a free program that does this locally on my machine at no charge.

Then again I'm fairly out of touch with the world. I heard a sales-person describe a website as a cloud service and I no longer think I understand technology anymore.

> Next, let’s talk about subvocalization. This is the process whereby, whenever you read, you talk to yourself, repeating every word in your head. The issue here is that most people can only speak at about 180wpm, maximum. Increasing speed beyond that means not saying every word to yourself.

This makes no sense to me. I've read at 600 wpm while sub-vocalizing every word. That's much much faster sub-vocalizing than they claim is possible. I've experienced it.

500 wpm with no training is an exaggeration. wpm also depends a lot on which book you're reading. however, RSVP is the fastest way to read and way over 500 wpm is possible with practice.

In the dropdown menu where you select a WPM rate, change the "data-value" attribute values in the li elements to whatever you want.

Also, although it helped my speed reading considerably, I would not adopt the current version of the product because it does not allow for pauses (eyes get tired, sneezes, blinks, distractions, etc), re-reads, time to ponder, etc. However, I think these problems can be addressed with very simple UI tweeks:

1. (On mobile) Push to read. Release to pause

2. Scroll to go back/forward

3. Ability to start and skip to other areas in the text, probably via some table of contents

4. Some estimate of remaining pages/words. I like to scroll ahead to see how long an article is. If the article is gone, I have no way of sensing duration. A displayed word count might help, but I'd imagine that few people can easily process number of words as a duration.

Compile: c++ speedread.cpp

Usage: ./a.out [delay_in_ms] < text

Should work on Mac and Linux, and maybe Windows if you uncomment the first line. (Looks like a #include <stdlib.h> needs to be included to make it compile on Linux. Not sure what I don't need that on Mac).

It's kind of fun. I played around with showing words at a constant rate, and with throwing in an extra delay whenever there was punctuation. The version below does the latter. I had thought of this as a possibly good way for displaying text on the limited phones of the early 2000s. Also, I thought it might be an interesting way to display status information on many processes at once. A display line wide enough to display, say, 10 words could be used to display 10 status messages at once instead of one.

Oh...2 clause BSD license, if anyone cares.

    //#include <windows.h>
    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <iostream>
    #include <string>

    #include <unistd.h>
    #include <signal.h>
    #include <sys/time.h>

    typedef unsigned long DWORD;

    bool cont = true;

    void
    stop( int sig )
    {
        cont = false;
    }

    void
    Sleep( int msec )
    {
        usleep( msec * 1000 );
    }

    DWORD
    GetTickCount()
    {
        static unsigned long base = 0;
        struct timeval tv;
        gettimeofday( &tv, 0 );
        if ( base == 0 )
            base = tv.tv_sec;
        return (tv.tv_sec - base) * 1000 + tv.tv_usec / 1000;
    }

    int main( int argc, char *argv[] )
    {
        int delay = 250;
        std::string word;

        if ( argc == 2 )
            delay = atoi(argv[1]);

        signal( SIGINT, stop );

        std::cout << "\n\n\n";

        int words = 0;
        DWORD start = GetTickCount();
        std::string display_word = "";
        while ( std::cin >> word && cont )
        {
            Sleep(delay);
            ++words;
            if ( display_word.length() )
                display_word += ' ';
            display_word += word;
            //if ( display_word.length() < 5 )
                //continue;
            word = display_word;
            display_word = "";
            int punc = word.find(".");
            if ( punc == std::string::npos )
                punc = word.find(",");
            int pad = 15 - word.length()/2;
            for ( int i = 0; i < pad; ++i )
                std::cout << " ";
            std::cout << " " << word << "                                  \r";
            std::cout.flush();
            if ( punc != std::string::npos )
                Sleep(2*delay);
        }
        DWORD stop = GetTickCount();
        float seconds = (stop - start) / 1000.0;
        printf( "\n%d words in %f seconds\n", words, seconds );
        if ( seconds != 0 )
            printf( "%f words/second, %f words/minute\n", words/seconds,
                    (60*words)/seconds );
        return 0;
    }

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mhg7vxTM9Q4

it seems human nature changes little.

More seriously, it's a fun toy, but as others pointed out, reading is not simply about reading one word at a time.

If I am reading for pleasure I am reading slowly, savoring each word and I want to go at a variable speed say 300-600wpm.

If I am reading something where each word is not important, then I am scanning, reading a line at a time and getting 1000+wpm.

Say it sits on the right, and you have text on the left. While skimming, if I spot something i want to read more in depth, I click on it, and the spritz starts. Then I start speed reading through on the spritz, and if I get stuck on something, I click again and the spritz pauses and highlights the current word or sentence. That way, I can quickly figure out where to read next. Then when I'm done, I click again and it continues to the end of the paragraph.

That said, reading the faq was rather tiring as it is. I was trying really hard to avoid reading, which my eyes were unhappy about.

Bienvenue dans votre premier Spritz ! On commence par 250 mots par minute, un peu plus que la vitesse moyenne de lecture qui est de 210 mots par minute. Pas d'inquiétude, nous irons plus vite dans un instant. En fait, nombreux sont ceux qui lisent déjà des Spritz à plus de 1.000 mpm. A cette vitesse on peut lire un roman de 1000 pages en seulement 10 heures. Que se passerait-il si votre vitesse de lecture pouvait doubler, sans diminuer pour autant votre compréhension ? Et si elle pouvait tripler ? Notre but est de répandre les Spritz à travers le monde et que 15% du contenu littéraire mondial puisse être lu via notre méthode d'ici 2016. Sélectionnez une nouvelle vitesse sur la droite quand vous êtes prêt ou cliquez sur un des drapeaux ci-dessous pour essayer Spritz dans une autre langue.

Prochain arrêt, 300 mots par minute ! A cette vitesse vous lisez environ 25% plus vite que la plupart des lecteurs chevronnés. Un autre effet positif des Spritz est qu'au-delà de 400 mpm votre compréhension se met à augmenter en même temps que la vitesse après seulement quelques sessions de lecture. De plus, comme dans un Spritz vos yeux ne se déplacent pas d'un mot à l'autre ni même d'une phrase à l'autre, vous pouvez lire pendant de longues périodes sans les fatiguer. Cliquez sur le menu déroulant pour essayer une autre vitesse.

Voilà déjà de vrais progrès ! Votre vitesse actuelle est de 350 mpm. A cette vitesse vous lisez 40% plus vite que la majorité des gens. Vous n'avez pas besoin de cours de speed­reading ou d'exercices supplémentaires avec Spritz. Nous développons sans cesse de nouveaux logiciels pour que vous puissiez lire globalement n'importe quel texte avec Spritz. Nous offrons également aux autres développeurs la possibilité d'intégrer Spritz dans leurs applications. Spritz est de loin la meilleure façon de lire les livres électroniques, emails, sites d'actualité et autres sites web.

Vous avez maintenant atteint 400 mots par minute. Prenons un instant pour discuter de ce que vous venez d'accomplir. Après seulement quelques minutes, vous pouvez maintenant lire des Spritz au moins 60% plus vite qu'avant. Réfléchissez à la manière dont vous lisez d'habitude sur votre portable. Grâce à Spritz, plus besoin de faire constamment défiler les textes tout en lisant ni de pincer ou tapoter votre écran pour redimensionner le contenu affiché. Les éditeurs peuvent présenter leur contenu sous une forme compacte qui pourra être lue confortablement sur un téléphone ou une tablette. Spritz prouve à quel point les appareils actuels paraissent larges et massifs : vous n'avez pas besoin de tout cet espace pour lire du contenu !

Impressionnant! 500 mots par minute après moins de dix minutes. Si c'est encore trop rapide, redescendez simplement à 400 mots par minute pour votre prochain essai. Vous découvrirez que plus vous êtes détendu, plus vite vous pouvez lire et meilleure sera votre compréhension du texte. Nos études ont même montré que l'utilisation régulière de Spritz permet d'augmenter durablement sa vitesse de lecture et son niveau de compréhension, et ce quel que soit le support ! Nous croyons sincèrement que Spritz va changer le monde et nous vous remercions d'avoir pris le temps de l'essayer. Vous pouvez nous soutenir en nous "likant" sur Facebook, en nous suivant sur Twitter et en parlant de nous autour de vous !

I compared it with the speed-reading app at spreeder.com, and Spritz's claims do seem to be born out. 500 wpm was a little too much for me at Spreeder, but with Spritz's improvements it became manageable.

One hack for easily putting the articles in to zapreader is to look for a print feature. When the article has a print lay out it is easier to copy and paste the text.

Potentially, a brief pause every 50 words or so would make sense in order to quickly move my eyes and unblock my vision, though obviously at the cost of some words per minute.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hughesoft....

The main motivation was to be able to get through light content more quickly, but I've noticed my general reading speed has increased too. For a lot of content I'm pretty comfortable at 500wpm using the app.

http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2004/11/08/spritz

http://padovachronicles.welton.it/2008/09/17/the-spritz-from...

My standing offer to take visitors out to sample a few in the piazza is always open.

The parenthesis here, rather than showing a complete group, end up getting broken apart and stuck to whatever word they're adjacent words. "...Co Founder)"

they told there's a point called ORP, it's the point on the word that people could recognize the word quickly. so if you align the point of each word, the reading of words will be easy.

the second point is reducing eye balls' rotation.

this really improved the way I read in English, love it :D

Another fact, that I think a designer team could adjust is not having a perspective the entire text, paragraph, etc. bothers me.

Other than that, when you need to speed read, it's true, it's faster than moving your eyes left-right (or right-left if you're Arabic).

• Up to 5 words in a flash. (Still centered using their technique) Because true speed reading doesn't take in each individual word, rather groups of words at each eye saccade stop.

• Pause / fine rate control.

• Image placeholder indication & image pause.

• Fine and course scrubbing revealing the position in a traditional section of text.

• Chapter / break markers

• User settings profiles.

• Bonus: blink / look-away detection.

I think it has massive potential!

pdftotext paper.pdf - | sed 's/\ /\n/g' | awk '{for(i=0;i<20-length($1)/2;i++)printf(" ");printf("%s \r", $1);system("sleep 0.12")}' NJOY!

credits: www.twitter.com/berlingozzo

@just2n, the above command is so short I was able to tweet it! :))

Also, I wonder how tired I'd get after reading like that for thirty minutes or a few hours.

But you can develop a lot of cool lightweight tools since it's something you could implement fairly easily on your own if the API becomes tainted.

I recently showed spreeder to my girlfriend who found the same thing.

http://robinduckett.github.io/orwell/

Change to one word at a time, 500 words per minute. I can still read it just fine.

How is this even remotely patentable. This has to have been done a thousand times. Do the the red letters and black lines make that much difference.

This was great.

> Well, we have to provide the content to you, don’t we? For more information, check out our Privacy Policy.

Or, the app could run locally after downloading a dictionary. Just sayin'.

I wish a lot of websites/apps provided this to be honest, reading black text on a white background is awful

pull request is welcome :D

But I believe, and that's my very own personal opinion, that showing short sentences instead of words helps much more to understand the content of the reading instead of trying to glue together meaningless words one by one, attaching the new isolated word to the previous and next word imposes a heavy burden in your brain.

Here is an example of what I mean:

* words in braces are red *

    Our [goal] here at Spritz
    is to [share] 
    our [spritzing] technologies
    with the [world]. 
    To [do] that, 
    we [created] 
    the [PoweredbySpritz™] program 
    that [facilitates] 
    the [development] 
    of [applications] 
    using [Spritz] technologies. 
    An entire host of [tools] 
    have been [created], 
    including [SDKs] and [APIs] 
    for [Android], [iOS], 
    and [Javascript] 
    to help [developers] 
    implement [spritzing] 
    [inside] of their 
    [applications] and [websites].

* Btw, I don't believe in patents, so even if I build on your idea, I could care less about patenting it. So fuck spritz. If anybody wants to develop it further more, go ahead, step on my shoulders, as I've stepped on giants before me too.