Spritz, a new app making its debut on Samsung devices, promises to help you read 250 to 1,000 words per minute.
If you constantly have a big stack of books and magazines on your bedside table, you might have at some point wished you were able to read a little bit faster. Luckily, there's an app for that.
Spritz, a new app making its debut on Samsung devices, promises to help you read 250 to 1,000 words per minute. To put that in perspective, at 1,000 words per minute, you'd be able to read an entire Harry Potter novel in a little over an hour.
So how does Spritz work? The technology "removes the inconvenience of scrolling, swiping, squinting and pinching to read on your devices by streaming individual words, one by one, at the user's desired speed," according to the Boston-based startup. Developed and tested for more than three years, the technology allows the brain to focus on each word, promoting faster reading and higher information retention.
The most time-consuming part of reading is the eye movement from word to word, Spritz said. The company's technology takes eye movement out of the equation by streaming individual words inside of a special display called a "redicle," which helps the eyes position themselves at the exact recognition point for each word.
When testing the app, Spritz found that new users were able to learn how to "spritz," and double their traditional reading speed, in just a few minutes.
"When we started testing, we already knew that we were on to something but the comprehension tests surprised even us," Dr. Maik Maurer, co-founder and CTO of Spritz, said in a statement. "Happily, our tests confirmed that spritzing increases comprehension. We're now starting to research whether time spent spritzing will also increase a user's traditional reading speed and comprehension, an effect reported to us by many of our testers."
The Spritz app is launching exclusively on the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S5smartphone and Gear 2 smartwatch. But, if you're interested in giving it a try right away, head over to Spritz's website to test your skills.
The company said it is working with other mobile device makers, wearable manufacturers, and e-book firms to make the technology more widely available in the future. At this point, the technology supports English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Korean, though Spritz said support for more languages is on the way.
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