Very interesting stuff. This demo would be more interesting if I could paste in my own text to confirm my comprehension. I could process Spritz's marketing statement at 500wpm, but it's fairly simple text and may have been optimized for the delivery mechanism. I'd like to try it on some text that I actually have an interest in reading.
Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
21–30 of 216 posts
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#22Looks like the same technology as spreeder ( http://www.spreeder.com/app.php )... what's the difference between the two? 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).
Interesting! I've always been able to read pretty darn quickly, but I've never played with RSVP before. I gave spreeder a try and found that with a chunk size of three words, 2000wpm is surprisingly comfortable and 2500wpm is pushing my limits but not unrealistic.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#23I wonder whether this uses the front-facing camera for blink detection, particularly at higher WPM settings. A blink typically lasts 100-400ms (per Wikipedia), and 500 WPM is .8333... words per 100ms. A blink thus seems very likely to miss a word or two once you're using this the way its creators intend. I don't see any mention of blinking or mitigating its impact on the site, though.
Blinking might explain why I strongly prefer 2-3 word chunks, instead of 1 word chunks, when I read with RSVP. Interesting. I can read some texts at 800 wpm with 2 word chunks but find it a lot more problematic with 1 word chunks so it's flashing twice as fast.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#24This is called RSVP. It is easier (for the same WPM) with 2-4 words at a time than 1 word. I really hope this catches on more and allows different chunk sizes. 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.
[deleted]
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#25I'm impressed. I often get my Mac to read things to me as I find it difficult to follow text. This was great.
I'm a big, no HUGE, fan of the Mac Text to speech thing. It's great for proofreading text, and reading non-code text.
@achalkley what speed do you use? This is where I have mine: http://i.imgur.com/nIO0gRw.png It's a little quick, but it keeps thing interesting ;)
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#26Looks like the same technology as spreeder ( http://www.spreeder.com/app.php )... what's the difference between the two? 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).
It doesn't seem to work very well for me. I tried it in two different browsers and I get this http://i.imgur.com/cEMcR0M.png when I try to enable chunks.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#27That's interesting. A technology like this was predicted, on theoretical grounds from reading research, in the book Reading in the Brain [1] by Stanislas Dehaene (which I highly recommend as a very good read). 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 coll…
How many second languages can you have?
Ethnologue states that there are 7105 languages in the world[0]. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that you can have x second languages, where x is any number between 0 and 7104.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#28I wonder whether this uses the front-facing camera for blink detection, particularly at higher WPM settings. A blink typically lasts 100-400ms (per Wikipedia), and 500 WPM is .8333... words per 100ms. A blink thus seems very likely to miss a word or two once you're using this the way its creators intend. I don't see any mention of blinking or mitigating its impact on the site, though.
Thank you for helping me figure out why my eyes started burning when I was spritzing. I think you subconsciously try to avoid blinking becuase you know you'll miss a word.
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#29As someone with horrible reading speed, the demo on their home page worked pretty well. I'd like to see a demo with some more advanced text. Marketing language is pretty easy to digest quickly. I'd like to see a selection from Gödel, Escher, & Bach or something to see how well I could comprehend more dense texts.
Yeah, you probably wouldn't get much out of GEB if you read it that way (the first time at least).
Re: Spritz – read 500 words per minute without any training
#30I played around with something like this a while ago (my files have 2004 timestamps, but those may have updated when I copied stuff to a new computer). I had a command-line based program that took text and displayed it a word at a time. If anyone would like to play around with it, here's my source.
Compile: c++ speedread.cpp
Usage: ./a.out [delay_in_ms] Should work on Mac and Linux, and maybe Windows if you uncomment the first line. (Looks like a #include 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
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include
#include
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 > word && cont )
{
Sleep(delay);
++words;
if ( display_word.length() )
display_word += ' ';
display_word += word;
//if ( display_word.length()