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Hate reading slowly? Spritz aims to allow people to read 1,000 words per minute

By Williams Pelegrin February 27, 2014

hate reading slowly spritz aims allow people read 1000 words per minute

If you ever wanted to read “A Game of Thrones,” odds are you were put off by the sheer number of pages each book in the series contains. For example, it is 819 pages worth of reading. Especially if you’re a slow reader, that doesn’t sound like a very fun number of pages. What if I told you that you could read the massive book in less than five hours? Spritz allows you to do just that.

In “Stealth Mode” for roughly three years, Spritz enables people to read words as they appear one at a time, in rapid succession. With Spritz, you can read anywhere from 250 to 1,000 words per minute.

Spritz allows you to start off at 250 words per minute:

Eventually, though, it’s time to cook with some gas at 350 wpm:

Finally, Spritz’s website currently allows users to go up to 500 wpm:

While rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), which is another way to speed up your reading, already exists, Spritz differs in that it focuses on the “Optimal Recognition Point,” or ORP. Notice the red letter whenever a word passes by? That’s the ORP, or “fixation point.”

Normally, when you read, your eyes hop from word to word, all the while figuring out the meaning of the word. Not only does this take time, but you only spend 20 percent of that reading time on processing whatever content you’re reading. The remaining 80 percent is used to go from word to word while looking for that fixation point, running the risk of skipping shorter words.

By indicating the ORP with red, and positioning each word so the location of the ORP doesn’t change, Spritz allows you to read and process the content while not having your eyes jump from word to word. This differs from RSVP, which simply shows you words in rapid succession without focusing on the ORP.

Spritz

While Spritz’s software will make its way to the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Galaxy Gear 2, Spritz wants its software to be in as many devices as possible. Its goal is to have 15 percent of the world’s textual content read through Spritz’s software by 2016.

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Williams Pelegrin

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Williams is an avid New York Yankees fan, speaks Spanish, resides in Colorado, and has an affinity for Frosted Flakes. Send all queries to wpelegrin(at)digitaltrends(dot)com

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Citizen Lab, the security group based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, has detailed a pair of zero-click exploits that targeted iOS 15 and iOS 16 devices last year. Labeled PWNYOURHOME and FINDMYPWN, these exploits were widely used by Pegasus-maker NSO Group against targets in Mexico and elsewhere.

The security lab notes that on iPhones with Lockdown Mode enabled, the target got real-time notifications if the Pegasus spyware tried to exploit the PWNYOURHOME vulnerability. NSO Group may have eventually devised a workaround against the alert system, but in general, there is no evidence that the aforementioned security flaw was abused on any device with Lockdown mode enabled.
“Given that we have seen no indications that NSO has stopped deploying PWNYOURHOME, this suggests that NSO may have figured out a way to correct the notification issue, such as by fingerprinting Lockdown Mode,” Citizen Lab writes in its exhaustive report.
The security lab suggests that all at-risk users should enable Lockdown Mode to ensure that they don’t become the next targets of Pegasus-fueled illicit surveillance — or any such spyware that is virtually impossible to detect in the wild.

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Meta, formerly Facebook.

Meta (formerly Facebook) might owe people who used the social media site between 2007 and 2022 some money due to privacy infringement, according to Mashable.

The social media giant has reached a settlement in a class-action lawsuit where it admits no fault in the claims against the company, but has agreed to pay out $725 million in damages. The money is available to all who submit a claim by the appropriate deadline of August 25, 2023. If you are (or were) a Facebook user, here's how to know if you're eligible and get your share of the settlement.
How to know if you're eligible
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A woman reads Where the Crawdad Sings on an Amazon Fire 7 Tablet.

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Why you should buy the Amazon Fire 7 Tablet
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