from Hacker News

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

by danlev on 6/25/14, 8:53 AM with 40 comments

  • by return0 on 6/25/14, 9:40 AM

    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.

  • by jmstout on 6/25/14, 9:37 AM

  • by orillian on 6/25/14, 4:10 PM

    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?

  • by jackweirdy on 6/25/14, 9:19 AM

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

  • by mbrock on 6/25/14, 9:51 AM

    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"...

  • by jawns on 6/25/14, 11:55 AM

    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

  • by krmmalik on 6/25/14, 1:46 PM

    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.

  • by libraryatnight on 6/25/14, 4:00 PM

    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?

  • by bagosm on 6/25/14, 9:22 AM

    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.

  • by dang on 6/25/14, 4:48 PM

    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.

  • by Houshalter on 6/25/14, 12:50 PM

    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.

  • by sgarbi on 6/25/14, 10:22 AM

    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.

  • by moron4hire on 6/25/14, 11:24 AM

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

  • by _mikz on 6/25/14, 9:17 AM

    Amazing name.

  • by rkv on 6/25/14, 2:13 PM

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

  • by dletozeun on 6/25/14, 12:55 PM

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

  • by pron on 6/25/14, 12:06 PM

    > 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.