Get ready to blow through all the books you've downloaded to your smartphone.
SpeedRead With Spritz, a 99-cent Android app, uses Spritz speed-reading technology to help people tackle the ebooks and articles on their phone at a ridiculously fast pace.
SpeedRead With Spritz, which works within document readers like Google Play Books and Pocket, presents your reading material one word at a time and rapidly moves through words at whatever speed you've selected. Instead of dragging your eyes across sentences, you just stare at the text box as the app flashes words at you.
An example of Spritz's speed-reading technology.
For example, you could set the reading rate at 1,000 words per minute, which, if you can actually follow along at that speed, would let you breeze through the 309-page Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in under 77 minutes. You could even set the rate higher, though we don't recommend it. You'd probably be more comfortable at 350 wpm, which is slightly higher than the 300 wpm that most people average.
College student Scott Brady, who developed SpeedRead With Spritz, told The Huffington Post that he began work on his app after he learned about Boston-based startup Spritz but couldn't find any apps that would let him use the company's speed-reading technology with the books he'd purchased for his phone.
"I was never contacted by Spritz to make SpeedRead," Brady said, "but since I’ve started, I have been in close contact with them. They’ve been super helpful in every stage of the app development and release!"
Enabling SpeedRead With Spritz is simple: You activate "read aloud" or "text to speech" from a drop-down menu, and that's it.
A handful of other smartphone apps also support Spritz technology, but SpeedRead With Spritz is the first Android app that works with Google Play Books and Pocket, both of which support text-to-speech functions.
Apps that don't use text-to-speech (Kindle and Oyster, for example) won't work with SpeedRead With Spritz.
Brady's app isn't available on iOS devices, but there are a few Spritz options made for that platform if you want to try them out. (FYI: The Huffington Post's iOS app supports Spritz technology.)