I'm not surprised that this slows down most people. But I'd be curious about a more targeted audience of people with known reading problems: people with dyslexia, for example. Or even regardless of speed, does it help overall with people who have comprehension problems with written communication?
We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
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Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#12> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica. BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques. We've wondered about Sans Forg…
nice to meet you, Nick! shooting you an email now :)
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#13> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica. BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques. We've wondered about Sans Forg…
This suggests that it is not that useful https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously...
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#14I'm not surprised that this slows down most people. But I'd be curious about a more targeted audience of people with known reading problems: people with dyslexia, for example. Or even regardless of speed, does it help overall with people who have comprehension problems with written communication?
i got that feedback a lot after initially posting the experiment:
> Since posting this experiment, I've received a lot of side comments along the lines of, "Well, of course I don't expect Bionic Reading to work for most people, but for [my subpopulation], it really works." If that were the case, we might expect to see disproportionate benefits for those participants who read faster with Bionic Reading than for those who read faster without Bionic Reading. Let's look at how many participants read faster with each font and their average speed gains.
there might be some specialized effect on folks with known reading problems, but bionic reading makes no claims to specifically work for those people but rather the whole population so that's what we decided to test.
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#15For me, it was a little surprising that there was no effect at all. For whatever reason it felt like it ought to have an impact. However, if I think about it, reading has been done for thousands of years and by now something like that would have prevailed if it was effective. Anyway, we need more experiments like this. I bet there are a ton of things out there that we think make out lives better, but in reality don't…
thanks rasul!
on an individual basis, there is some evidence that reading with your "best" font may have a meaningful impact on reading speed with no loss of comprehension. but you could probably unlock these gains by simply switching from, say, arial to garamond (i made that up for illustrative purposes), rather than implementing this complex font style.
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#16Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all source…
We already have rating systems and reviews that are human-generated and human-curated to help you decide if a book is "worthwhile". How could an AI language model improve on that? In other words, why would you trust AI more than human curators/reviewers?
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#17Hopefully in the future, language models will be able to read books for us and summarize whether or not they’re worthwhile. Bumping from 200 wpm to 300 wpm doesn’t put a dent in the 100+ million books circulating in print. Unrelated Readwise questions (love the work y’all do, thank you!) - any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go? - is there a random quote API that references all source…
hey there! thanks for the kind words :)
on AI-based booked summarization, here's a really interesting article by OpenAI on the topic: https://openai.com/blog/summarizing-books/
*any idea when the chrome app will support multiple highlights in one go?* we have a new browser extension (yet unreleased) that enables you to highlight the native page (i think that's what you're asking)
*is there a random quote API that references all sources at once?* at the individual user level, yes. readwise.io/api_deets
*has the team considered adding semantic search to the app?* not yet, but my cofounder tristan did push a huge full-text search update a few months ago that makes search results 10x better than they were before
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#18> we intend to run some more tests in the hopes of discovering a screen reading technique that yields material benefits. We're aware of a couple other technologies that seem interesting including BeeLine Reader, Spritz, and Sans Forgetica. BeeLine founder here — feel free to reach out prior to your testing (nick@[domain]). We can share info on past testing and implementation techniques. We've wondered about Sans Forg…
This suggests that it is not that useful https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/previously...
Thanks for the info — I’d been hopeful about Forgetica based on some general research about disfluent fonts and memory. But I guess things don’t look so rosy for this particular one, at least based on this one study. Thanks for sharing!
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#19Thanks for posting this - I appreciate the thorough analysis, as well as complete transparency around methods and data.
Re: We found no evidence that Bionic Reading has a positive effect on reading speed
#20Thanks for posting this - I appreciate the thorough analysis, as well as complete transparency around methods and data.
thanks marc! appreciate the kindness.
ps- philly native here :)