This app trains you to read a 1,20,000-word novel in 2 hrs

It lets your eye take in huge quantities of words at an accelerated rate

In the movie Lucy, Scarlett Johansson plays a woman who ingests a drug that gives her super-intelligence, allowing her to read huge volumes of material in just minutes.In real life, Boston tech startup Spritz has made a speedreading app that allows you to do just that.

After a small amount of practice reading with the Spritz app, you should be able to read at 1,000 words per minute -a speed fast enough to let you take in a 1,20,000 word novel in just two hours.

The app has a novelty factor -it feels bizarre to let your eyes passively take in huge quantities of words at an ac celerated rate instead of leisurely scanning sentences the old-fashioned way. And as everything comes at a constant speed, you can't slow down to savour a passage or skip past the boring bits. But in terms of raw factual intake, it can't be beaten.Will consumers get used to it? Probably: They got used to the pageless pagination of the Kindle, after all.

Spritz founder and CEO Frank Waldman believes his company will give birth to a golden era of speed reading.

Samsung's line of Gear smart watches, t he impending launch of the Apple Watch, and Google Glass a l l b e g the same question: How will these new, tiny screens deliver information? Spritz solves that problem by delivering words in a stream instead of in a series of lines. In fact, Spritz is already integrated into the Gear 2 watches, Waldman said.

However, anyone who worries about constant information overload in the digital age might not be too enthusiastic about Spritz's other interesting effect: Waldman says that just because Spritz allows you to read twice as fast doesn't mean you're going to cut your reading time in half. “It enables readers to read more. if you read twice as fast you don't read half .the time, you read twice as much,“ Waldman says 

Source | Economic Times | 14 November 2014