This App Claims It Can Triple How Fast You Read

Google set out to organize and digitize the world's information, and it's done a pretty stellar job of it. Now if only we had time to read it all. Or even a tiny fraction of it all. To get around the frustrating slowness of consuming text, some entrepreneurs are trying to "disrupt" the act of reading and usher in a post-reading future where technology will make it possible to digest information two, three, four times as fast as we can now.

The latest effort is an app called Spritz, that claims it can double your reading speed within minutes of using it, and triple it once you get used to the app. Focused on reading on small displays like mobile phones and wearable devices, it debuted Sunday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and will launch in April on the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Gear 2 smartwatch.

The idea is that traditional reading—scanning a big block of text—takes up too much space on such tiny screens, and is limited by the inefficiency of having to move your eyeball from word to word and line to line. The Spritz app rethinks this by streaming the content one word at a time and highlighting specific letters in red with a marker line above them to tell you exactly where to keep your focused fixed to avoid the precious time lost by having to move your eyeballs around.

Eye movement accounts for some 80 percent of the time spent reading, in fact, leaving only 20 percent to actually take in the content, explains the company’s blog. “Each time you see text that is not centered properly on the ORP [Optimal Recognition Position], your eyes naturally will look for the ORP to process the word and understand its meaning. This requisite eye movement creates a “saccade”, a physical eye movement caused by your eyes taking a split second to find the proper ORP for a word. Every saccade has a penalty in both time and comprehension, especially when you start to speed up reading.”

I tried the feature out and frankly it gave me a headache; also, if you look away for a minute you'll miss whole sentences, so that’s problematic. But, supposedly, it works. The average adult reading level is just below 300 words per minute, and Spritz claims it can get users easily up to 500 wpm and eventually, depending on your skill, up to 1,000 wpm. I mean, who doesn’t want to be able to do that? And it’s not the same as skimming; the company also claims that comprehension actually increased in beta trials.

The idea of streaming one word at a time isn't new; it's been around for years in fact, as have other forms of speed-reading tools and apps. What sets this one apart is the eye-positioning display feature, and the fact that Spritz clearly has an eye toward the future, "as smart devices continue to change shape and become increasingly smaller,” co-founder and CEO Frank Waldman said in a company press release. "Our technology can be used to read emails, text messages, social media streams, maps or web content and can be integrated onto any mobile device—the options are almost limitless."

After the Samsung devices the company has its sights set on e-books, education software, and future wearables. (No mention of an iOS or Android version yet.) Think: Google Glass where the words appear one-by-one on the augmented lens in front of your eyes, enabling you to read the morning news at warp speed. The Spritz website shies away from mentioning Glass specifically, but does hint at head-mounted displays. "I don’t think we can say ‘Smoogle Mass’ but we’re already working on your favorite shower-time wearable. Think about lying in bed, reading your favorite literature, drool running down your chin,” the website states. “Traditional books are just sooo heavy, ya know?"