2x Your Reading Speed with an App That Reads to You
Tired? Get distracted? Want to read faster? Here’s how I do it
The App
Download Speechify, highlight some text on your browser, hit play, and Speechify will read it out to you. Pretty cool huh?
The Background Story
My name is Cliff and I love to learn. I’m the kind of person who uses keyboard shortcuts obsessively, I listen to~100 Audiobooks a year, and when someone stole my computer I spent 7 hours tracking him down until I got it back.
But here is the thing, I read slowly. This is super annoying when you realllllly want to build a jetpack and there is no Audiobook for the wikipedia page on Thermodynamics, or when a friend recommends a great Medium article but it’s long (you want to finish it, but it’s difficult to get through that middle section without getting distracted), or when it’s 2 AM and you want to proofread your essay but your eyes are falling asleep, or when you read an email that runs a couple paragraphs long.
Realistically, I ended up not reading that Wikipedia article, I didn’t finish that Medium post, I got a lower grade on that paper than I would have if I’d proofread it properly, and I only skimmed the highlights of that email. For me this was awful — so many things I could have learned and I didn’t. I felt blocked, trapped by my reading speed. By the fact that I got tired and sometimes distracted. Why does reading need to be such a chore?
At the same time, listening is becoming so dominant — 73 Million Americans listen to at least one podcast every month, 48 Million listen once a week, and 19% increase the speed when listening. So why can’t I listen to my readings?
A Better Way
When I was 12 I listened to Harry Potter Audiobooks 22 times in a row. That’s how I learned English. That’s how I fell in love with Audiobooks. As I got older I built a habit of rolling out of bed and putting in my earphones first thing in the morning. By the time I’m brushing my teeth I’m already listening to a book. When I longboard/walk/drive to class I’m listening to a book. When I’m cleaning or cooking I’m listening to a book. If I’m working out or eating alone I’m listening to a book.
When I first got an iPod I saw the little button that lets you speed up an audiobook. I clicked it.
BOOM
1.25x Speed. WHAT?! You can speed up a book?
1.5x Speed. Wait, I can still understand at this pace!
2.0x Speed. Okay this is too fast.
2 Weeks later.
2.0x Speed. Huh, this doesn’t seem as fast now, I can understand this easily.
2.25x Speed. It takes much more concentration but I can understand what’s going on here as well if I try.
2.5x Speed. Okay this is too fast. Maybe two weeks from now I’ll be able to listen to this.
It turns out, that if you practice you can easily get to the point where you can listen faster. This is true of everyone.
Put It All Together
When I started college, I could not keep up with the amount of reading I needed to do. It simply was not possible for me to read everything I was assigned in class and still sleep, eat, and spend time with friends. The issue was that none of the readings I was assigned: Ebooks, PDFs, websites, textbooks had an audio version. I started trying out every single piece of software that could read out my readings to me, but all the existing options were clunky, slow, and expensive. In addition, the voices did not go fast enough and didn’t have high enough quality, they were difficult to learn, required me to copy and paste text into a window or had toolbars that took over my screen, and they didn’t let me do basic functions like pause in the middle of reading or change the speed while the voice is speaking.
So, little by little I started to build my own software. Speechify voices can go crazy fast and use Deep Learning Based text to speech to produce far more high quality audio.
Speechify works on any text on your browser just select the text you want to read, click play, and it will read while highlighting the word on the native page as it reads it to you!
Speechify is super fast and easy to use and even has a range of keyboard shortcuts (like Alt+A to start speaking) that let you use it more easily.
AND Speechify even lets you text articles or any other text you need from your Chrome to your cellphone as an audio link so you can listen on the go. Speechify for Chrome is also totally free!
How Can You Benefit From This?
In the U.S. the average reading speed is 200 words per minute. With Speechify I listen at 500–600 words per minute and most first time users can already start listening at 300–400 words per minute. Which means tha off the bat you can likely increase your reading speed by 75% and after a few weeks of practice you’ll be able to increase your reading speed by 3x. To do this, listen to your readings with Speechify and always push yourself to listen at the fastest pace where you still have full comprehension.
By listening with Speechify you get to use both your sense of sight and your sense of hearing at the same time to intake information, this results in increased comprehension.
By following along with the fast paced reading and text highlighting it is harder to get distracted. Use this to your advantage when it’s hard to focus and especially at night when your eyes get tired.
Before you know you are about to be on the go use Speechify to text your required reading to your phone as an audio link so you can listen while walking around/doing other things.
How To Best Use Speechify
Speechify Shortcuts
The simplest way to use Speechify is to click play once you select the text you want. But to get to the next level it’s valuable to know how to use keyboard shortcuts. To do so, once you highlight the text you want to read press Alt+A to start speaking (The Alt key is the same as the Option key on Mac). You can then press Alt+Q to play/pause the speech.
To decrease the speech as it is speaking hold Alt and then press S as many time as needed to slow to the speed you want. To speed up, hold Alt key and press D as many times as needed to reach the speed you want. If you run into a section you’ve heard before you can speed it up, and if you run into a section that is particularly dence you can slow it down. You can change the Speechify shortcuts on Chrome to whatever you like best by going to this link (command+F and search for Speechify to find it on the page).
How To Best Select/Highlight Text
When I use Speechify on Chrome, I like to highlight one or two paragraphs at a time, listen to them and then highlight the next two paragraphs. Other people like to highlight the entire article at once. You can do whatever you like best, but I recommend the two paragraphs at a time method. To do this well, you need to know how to easily highlight text on your computer, so here are the important tricks to know for that:
You can triple click any word in a paragraph with your mouse to highlight the entire paragraph at once. Try it now. Triple click this paragraph on medium then hit Alt+A on your keyboard to have Speechify read to you.
An even better way to highlight text is the Shift+Click tric. Double click any word in order to select that word, then hold Shift and, while holding down Shift single click a word lower down or higher up in the page. All the text between these two words will be highlighted. Then hit Alt+A to start reading that text with Speechify. Try this now, highlight the third word in this paragraph “better” by double clicking it, then triple click HERE.
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You will see that you’ve succeeded in highlighting all the text between “better” and “HERE” now hit Alt+A to play it with Speechify. You can now click Alt+Q to pause the voice, you can then click Alt+Q to resume. You can speed the voice up with Alt+D, or slow it down with Alt+S.
Other Platforms
Regardless of what type of phone you use, you can use the Chrome Extension to send your phone mobile web audio links and have them read out to you. If you have an iPhone or iPad you can also use the Speechify iPhone/iPad app which can also allow you to scan books with your camera and translate books from one language to another.
If you are a Mac user you can also use the Speechify Mac Application. The Mac app has even more features and is intended for power users. For example, the Mac App will let you take screenshots of text on your computer even if the text is not highlightable, and will let you upload PDFs into the iPhone app.
Feedback
If you already use Speechify a lot, let us know what you use it for. If there is a killer feature you think we should add please let us know about it. Thoughts from users like you are often how we make decisions on what we should build next. Just drop me a line at hello.cliff@getspeechify.com
Want to help more people find Speechify? Take 5 seconds to rate us 5 stars on the Chrome Web Store here.
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