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Readsy Adds Spritz’s Speed Reading Tech to Your Web Browser

logo[1]Want to try the speed reading tech offered by Spritz but not sure how? Then you should check out Readsy.

Readsy is a browser tool that helps to speed up your reading by taking whatever page you are looking at, filtering out the extraneous material, and presenting the body of text one word at a time in a window that looks something like this:

3027008-inline-56tvouk[1]Readsy is available as a Chrome plugin and a bookmarklet, and there is also a demo website.

I spent a few minutes with it today and I can confirm that the bookmarklet works with most pages in Firefox. It takes you to a page on the Readsy website  and shows you the window there, and once you’re done you’ll need t click the back button to return to whichever page you were viewing before.

That’s not a terribly good design (a popup window would be better) but it is enough to give you a taste of how the Spritz tech works.

Based on the demo video I found on Youtube, Readsy was released some time in May. It doesn’t appear to have gotten much attention just yet.

According to the website, Readsy is the work of a sophomore at Princeton University majoring in Computer Science. It ties into the API provided by Spritz to increase up your reading speed using a concept called rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). It works by flashing a single word in front of you at a time, at speeds ranging from 250 wpm to 600 wpm. RSVP been around since the 1970s, and as I have pointed out before it has any number of deficiencies, including inducing headaches, poor retention and comprehension, etc.

If you don’t want to use the Readsy bookmarklet, you can also find Spritz tech integrated into The Old Reader.

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Comments


Valentine July 16, 2014 um 7:03 am

People preffer text over video because they can read the text at their own speed. Some paragraphs/words are easier to process, others harder.
Looking at your reading speed, the best you can do, is find the average. Not the fixed one they’re trying to force on people.

There’s a technical website with paid/free tutorials on "Ruby on Rails". They have podcasts, and their text versions, called asciicasts. If you want a first look, podcasts are good, but the text one is better when you want to reread something.


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