Squirt: Speed read the web, one word at a time | Hacker News Reader

Squirt: Speed read the web, one word at a time

squirt.io

53 pointsdanlev40 comments

This kind of things are gimmicky at best, and an awful reading experience at worst. The time it takes for your eyes to adjust to the blinking letters is larger than the saccadic movement, and a single saccade reads a bunch of words instead, allowing you to both comprehend the sentence immediately, and also easily skip back-forward in case of errors.

On the other hand, I found it incredibly useful. My mind often wanders when I read, and Squirt solves that.

I found their choice of color scheme jarring. They highlight a specific letter in blue for some reason, and you get a strange optical sensation after staring at that shade of blue for too long. I had to download their js and css, rehost it myself, search through it for the color code, and change it to black. But then I found it very useful.

I suspect that's done to help anchor your focus, i.e. so your eyes don't move too much

Perhaps adding a little bit of grey to the blue would help?

I agree with you. I've found it extremely useful to quickly pass through light reads. But sometimes, I wish there was a feature to display 'fixed width', that way small words can be combined, and will give more fixation time at higher speeds.

Using an extension similar to this (readline) has let me read things much more rapidly than my normal reading speed. Even faster considering it prevents my mind from wandering or eyes from getting distracted. It's not a gimmick at all.

I notice I get tunnel vision staring at the exact same spot for 10 seconds. The rest of the screen starts to flicker or something, like when you were a kid and would stare at an inverse American flag before looking at a white wall.

EDIT ten minutes later my eyes still hurt

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7385634

While it is pretty interesting for quick reading of small snippets of text it begins to fail when trying to build up a comprehension map of a large body of information. Especially if that information is of a highly technical nature. The lack of comprehension is compounded; the more unfamiliar you are with the concepts at hand.

One of the things that we do without thinking about it is make associations between things we know and things we don't know when reading. This allows us to provide a framework for the words and phrases we don't understand using the ones that we do, thus pulling the meaning out of the context. Spritz and by extension Squirt does not allow you to create these links because you don't retain the full breadth of the context for each word as you are reading them, and with no built in method for jumping back or forth through the information being presented it fails to allow these bridges to be built, and this lowers comprehension.

Now take something like this and implement an interface that tracks the users eye movement via a webcam to allow the flow of words to jump backwards and forwards through the surrounding information might work. But you would have to do some pretty impressive eye tracking and do it all with as little delay as possible to make the flow smooth, no matter what direction it goes. That said jumping back in the information would probably be jarring if the text just starts to flow in reverse. So one would probably have to jump back with some kind of visual cue to a pointer further back in the text and then continue reading forward again.

Also I'd love to see this implemented where it shows a sentence at a time. I'd be interested in the overall improvements to retention and understanding that would be gained with a reduction in potential top speed per word read. How drastically does speed fall off when you do this?

Isn't this just a clone of Spritz? http://www.spritzinc.com/

isn't that yet another rsvp implementation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentatio...)?

Cameron does give credits to Spritz on his page.

I think this kind of thing is pretty interesting... For me, the reason I can't use it for most stuff I read is that I often need more time to process/understand certain words and names. On the first article from Instapaper that I tried this on, I was fed a sentence containing the words "doxological peregrinations." That threw me off, and then I knew I would have trouble keeping up. It'd be interesting if there was some nonintrusive way to dynamically adjust the speed. I also found it confusing when first names and surnames were separated, because I tend to recognize a person's name as a whole entity. Spritz seems to use longer pauses for commas, which seems helpful. But I really miss being able to see the whole sentence I'm "reading"...

If you pause playback, the surrounding words appear. If you then hold down the right arrow key, you can speedread at your own pace.

I wish keyboard buttons were pressure-sensitive so that you could adjust how fast something is going by pressing harder. But in lieu of that, using arrow keys to scroll through the words is a pretty nice reading experience for me.

For me it's more than just the sentence that I miss reading. I miss the context of the entire paragraph and, to a lesser degree, being able to see the preceding and following paragraphs.

I recently rediscovered the joy of reading longer pieces that take their sweet time to build up to a point, or to explain something complex. These texts are generally both longer and denser than, say, blog posts, and while paragraphs don't always require repeated reading, I usually find myself skipping back and forth between them to get a good mental image of the way they relate to each other.

I think tools such as this might be useful for reading relatively simple texts (blog posts, biographies, certain novels), but if anything I want to do less of that in the first place.

You'll notice that in the site's Acknowledgements section, the first to be credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending" [1].

Also in the acknowledgements is a link[2] titled "The problem with software patents."

Essentially, Squirt's creator, Cameron Boehmer, is letting everyone know that he has appropriated patent-pending technology because he rejects the idea that the method should be patentable. (Whether a court will disagree with him and impose a fine is, apparently, a chance he's willing to take.)

---

[1] http://www.spritzinc.com

[2] http://lmgtfy.com/?q=the+problem+with+software+patents

Well, should it? It's a neat idea. But what exactly is the big deal being patented here? It's pretty trivial.

To me it seems that it's a bit like patenting flappy bird.

The patent acknowledges that Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) methods have been around since the 1970s. Spritz's particular method of RSVP applies research into the optimal positioning of words to reduce or eliminate saccades (rapid movement of the eye). This is called ORP-RSVP (the ORP stands for Optimal Recognition Position).

I would think that if you are opposed to the idea of software patents in general, you would no doubt be opposed to this particular software patent.

But if you are not necessarily opposed to all software patents, but only the ones that try to patent something trivial, or try to add the words "on a computer" to an established real-world practice, then the question arises: Is Spritz's method, which positions words according to an algorithm that is meant to reduce saccades, trivial? One could argue that because it's an actively researched problem, it's not.

But even if you think that Spritz has a chance of getting its patent accepted, a further question arises: Does Squirt's implementation of ORP-RSVP use the method that Spritz is trying to patent, or some other similar method? I imagine there are probably a bunch of different ORP-RSVP methods, and it's not immediately clear whether Squirt's method is a true clone. It could very well end up that even though Squirt is heavily implying that it's using the patent-pending technology, it's actually using a different method.

They even have their own bookmarklet:

http://www.spritzinc.com/where-can-i-experience-spritz/

Squirt is prettier but the functionality looks identical.

I remember looking for this when spritz first came out and thinking - oh great I have to wait for all of these different platforms to integrate the spritz API to use it. Glad to see there is a way to use it.

I want this as a mobile app, and I want it to be able to read anything I throw at it. Right now, I have "readquick" on my iPad. I haven't checked if it can read PDF's but I think it can, so that helps me read most things as I can read anything that's in my "Pocket" list. But, Read Quick doesn't do the color highlighting which seems to be the killer thing here.

So. Are you going to give me an iPad app that integrates with Pocket and can read PDF's or integrate with Kindle and iBooks? That's when it becomes super useful and I would definitely sign-up and if you let me try it for long enough to make sure I'm happy with it, then I'm also willing to pay.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/readme!/id877697552?ls=1&mt=... Readme licenses the spritz tech.

Does readquick let you import existing PDFs?

Thanks for that link. It's a very useful find. Maybe I will be able to read Atlas Shrugged in a day after all. ReadQuick seems to be more about reading the web, so it serves well as a complement to Pocket. Not sure if it can handle PDFs. I just took a look and can't seem to find a way to do it.

Generally speaking, I do find ReadQuick has a very elegant UX, so I'd much prefer to use that app for all my reading needs. Just a shame it doesn't employ spritz technology and support for ePubs etc.

I see a lot of comments showing Spritz, but this concept is completely new to me and this is my first time trying something like this.

I've spent the last hour or so using this bookmarklet to read various articles and I have to say this is really cool. While I love to read, it's usually in short bursts because I get distracted. With this I went through a couple longer articles without changing tabs, or coming back to them. This really helps with my ADD.

I'll likely Google later, but is anyone immediately aware if there have been studies on this style of reading for people with ADD?

I have tried this in the past. I dont know if it's the same product or other, but same idea. My main problems where that I want to pause, maybe google some words or terms or person, go back to previous sentence, or skip some sentences alltogether. It gave me a lot of trouble because I couldn't find the text I wanted to highlight/rightclick/google etc, so I ended up taking more time for the same text.

That being said, I do believe it has it's uses. Maybe on a mobile device, maybe for literature only.

Submitters: before posting, please check whether a story has had a major discussion recently, as this one has:

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=squirt.io#!/story/forever/0/squirt...

The cutoff is about a year, so we're burying this submission as a dupe.

I like readline better: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/readline/hjbkmfadm...

You can highlight the text you want to read or hover over a paragraph and click it while holding alt.

Great idea! I would suggest adding an option to read the highlighted text so as to make sure you can get the plugin to work even when it can't detect the portion of the page where the article is.

This is ludicrously wrong. Real speed-reading requires reading multiple words at a time.

To me, speed-reading is "reading very quickly". I don't think that the exact method really matters all that much... or at least it shouldn't.

Amazing name.

Well... from the previous HN discussion I had Squirt in my favorites bar, until I did a work presentation and realized the name could be misinterpreted! I then quickly deleted it.

How could it be misinterpreted?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_ejaculation

My thoughts exactly. I bookmarked this as 'Speed Reading', instead.

You could always rename it!

I've tried Squirt and it's great, but as Steve Ballmer proved naming anything 'squirt' or 'squirting' is not a path to long-term product success.

The thought of anything squirting in my eyes, ears or wherever is one I don't want.

Only problems I see with this are (1) Blinking (2) Might have to simplify vocabulary

Interesting idea but I just blinked and missed a word, too bad.

> Average readers read between 120 and 200 words per minute

I don't know if that's true or not, but my reading speed is over 500 wpm, and I'm not even a native English speaker. At that speed, Squirt makes me seasick.

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