To use Spreed, highlight the passage you want to speed-read in Chrome, then press Alt + V (or Option + V on a Mac) or right-click and select Spreed selected text. Silencing that voice lets you gradually increase your reading speed from an average of 200 words per minute to 400 or more. Like all the extensions on this list, it aims to eliminate subvocalization-where you use your inner voice to sound out words in your head. But it has a long way to go before it changes the habits of readers.Spreed is the most popular speed-reading extension on the Chrome store. For shorter documents, or situations where you really need to digest something in a hurry, Spritz is a wonder, a technological marvel. iBooks, Kindle and Nook have yet to adopt it. At the moment, it’s only available on a handful of second-rate reading apps (the one I used was called ReadMe!, with a deliberate exclamation mark). If Spritz is going be used as a novel-reading tool, then the technology needs to be able to handle complex, nuanced writing. You can do it, but there are far more pleasant and logical ways to get there. At the moment, reading a novel on Spritz is like riding a unicycle from Shepherd’s Bush to Brick Lane. Ferris’ exquisite dialogue is not allowed any room to breathe. Reading a book – and especially one as complex as Ferris’s – isn’t just about comprehension or speed. Spritz is a fantastic tool, but it’s just not ready for novels. Taking breaks into account, my total reading time was four hours, 13 minutes. By the time O’Rourke wraps up his quest, a changed man in Israel, I felt as though I had walked there with him – and not in a good way. I read the last quarter of the novel in a kind of determined stupor. And although I tried to take breaks, my neck was starting to ask very pointed questions about why I was putting it through this. My fingers had locked, claw-like, around my phone. Look up for one second at 700wpm, and you lose eleven words – and trust me, when O’Rourke gets deeper into investigating why the Ulm religious group is tweeting and Facebooking in his name, these are not words you can afford to miss. Spritz demands total concentration, especially at higher speeds. I was still retaining everything, but I was in agony. For a moment, the app looked profoundly confused, as if it had also had a little too much Pinot.Īround three o’clock, I really ran into bother. When Spritz tried to run those last three words, the on-screen text appeared to stall temporarily as it displayed words with identical commas after them. At one point, O’Rourke reflects on the vacuous activities available in New York City, musing on how he could walk into a bar and “drink Pinot until bohemianism and Billie Holiday worship saturated my soul and I was drunk, drunk, drunk”. And the tech has a real problem with repeated words. Plug a book by Elmore Leonard or George Pelecanos into Spritz, and you’ll lose the plot in minutes. That’s not to say Spritz is without problems. And by the time one o’clock rolled around, I was up to 650wpm. Not a problem: I was retaining everything. And I was understanding all of it.įerris is a cracking writer, but he does have a tendency to veer off into lengthy digressions about religious doctrine, or philosophising from the curmudgeonly O’Rourke. I started off at a relatively mild 350wpm, but soon graduated to a cruising altitude of 600wpm. The big problem with speed reading is comprehension – Anne Jones, the current top competitive speed reader, set a 2001 competition record of 2,246wpm with a 60% comprehension rate. But what’s immediately clear is that Spritz works beautifully. He’s a proud luddite who refuses to have a Facebook page and nurtures a mighty distrust of Google, so it seems a little perverse to read his story on an iPhone using a specialised speed-reading app. It’s been in development for some time, but has only recently become available for mobile use, on iOS and Android (or at least, the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Gear 2).įerris’s hero, Paul O’Rourke, is a defiant technophobe. The words are displayed in large type on your screen, appearing in rapid succession at any speed you like. With Spritz, this means that a single letter in each word is highlighted in red. Process that, and you grasp the meaning of the word much faster. The company claims that each word we read has what’s known as an Optimal Recognition Point. The technology behind Spritz is fascinating. Developed by a Boston company of the same name, it’s an add-on for e-reader apps that aims to let you blitz through a book at up to 1,000 words per minute (wpm), a speed comparable with competitive speed-readers.
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