

Zethos – Speed reading tool in 1 kb - kumarski
http://www.zolmeister.com/2014/03/zethos-35-million-in-1kb.html

======
gkoberger
I love you made something and open sourced it, however your multiple mentions
of $3.5 million ignores a _lot_ of what goes into software development:

\- Most of Spritz's work went into the R&D, not the actual code. Anyone can
copy the end result.

\- Zethos ignores a lot of the science that makes Spritz work so well.

\- Spritz does localization, not just best-guess-English.

\- Usability (as in, how do I even run Zethos on, say, a book?) is important.

\- Spritz has an SDK for Android, iOS, JavaScript and more. They support
Google Glass, watches, etc. Ubiquity is important.

\- Marketing, bizdev, support, design, QA, legal, HR.

\- Money raised is a horrible metric for code. Even revenue wouldn't work
here.

Think about it this way: a ton of people cloned Flappy Birds in HTML when it
came out, but none of them are worth anything. I could do a decent rendition
of Facebook in a few hours, but that doesn't make me Mark Zuckerberg.

~~~
rjzzleep
> \- Most of Spritz's work went into the R&D, not the actual code. Anyone can
> copy the end result.

conveniently ignoring the fact that most of it was not actually spritz'
research. the only "extension" if you so will is that colored cursor.
acereader[1] for example has been around for 10 years(or almost 10 years). go
to google scholar, and search for saccadic eye movement. for example here is a
paper from 1992! [2]. here's another one from 2006 [3]

> Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of text has been reported to foster
> higher reading rates than presentation in a continuous text (CT) format,
> possibly because scanning eye movements are minimized. We investigated how
> this might be relevant for persons with congenital nystagmus (CN).

the fact that spritz may even get credited with this is the very problem of
our buzz society. i refuse to believe that creating a crossplatform sdk or
"researching" the fact that using a fixed cursor to reduce said saccadic eye
movement even further requires 3 million usd. don't get me wrong i'm a little
happy that they created enough buzz for this to become popular. but if we
really need that much money to do basic tasks, god help us.

> \- Zethos ignores a lot of the science that makes Spritz work so well.

:D like what?

> \- Usability (as in, how do I even run Zethos on, say, a book?) is
> important.

how do you run spritz? spritz is an SDK(!). it's not an ebook reader, it's not
a website reader it's an sdk. it's up to you to integrate it in your app.

EDIT: this was written before parent appended SDK information to his post

> \- Money raised is a horrible metric for code. Even revenue wouldn't work
> here.

> Think about it this way: a ton of people cloned Flappy Birds in HTML when it
> came out, but none of them are worth anything. I could do a decent rendition
> of Facebook in a few hours, but that doesn't make me Mark Zuckerberg.

your analogy is completely faulty. first of all mark zuckerberg didn't "make"
facebook contrary to popular belief. second, flappy bird itself was already a
clone that got popular, similar to spritz. third, no, you can't just roll your
own facebook in a few hours. you can create something that looks like it,
being far from functionally the same. spritz is different. create a spritz
clone though? see below:

[https://github.com/OnlyInAmerica/OpenSpritz-
Android](https://github.com/OnlyInAmerica/OpenSpritz-Android)

the difference? it's not a library. meaning noone can really reuse the code
provided in here. i doubt spritz is going to be that easy to integrate with
academic pdf's. though i have a feeling that that's what they might be using
their couple million funding on. i have a todo list that's at least 5 years
old with a speed reader for pdf's in the list. but is it worth investing time
in? sure, if you give me 3 million(i'm not actually being fully serious here,
so spare me logical inconsistency analysis of my post)

[1] [http://www.acereader.com/](http://www.acereader.com/)

[2]
[http://www.citeulike.org/group/6810/article/3309870](http://www.citeulike.org/group/6810/article/3309870)

[3]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16909075](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16909075)

EDIT: there have already been a few rsvp browser extensions for both firefox,
and chrome over the last couple of years, but there never was any buzz around
any of them.

[http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/11/windows/internet/reasy-r...](http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/11/windows/internet/reasy-
reader.html)

[http://youtu.be/MuszcoVL3lA](http://youtu.be/MuszcoVL3lA)

~~~
edraferi
The major missing feature appears to be intelligent hyphenation. Long words
should be broken up by syllable, not raw character count. it's missing the
little hash mark at the focus letter as well, but that's an easy fix.
intelligent hyphenation likely requires some real NLP work, or at least
importing a real dictionary of some kind

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zk00006
Is it just me, or other people are also not able to get the content of the
text while testing these method? Reading is highly non-linear and it is
necessary to spend more time on some parts of the sentence than the others.
Streaming the words linearly just does not work for me at all.

~~~
ozh
These tools are not to _read_. They're to _quickly scan_ texts and get the
general meaning. You would never, never want to read a novel using this.

~~~
seren
If I want to quickly scan an article, I start by a few opening sentences, then
go directly to the conclusion, and if it is not enough I will quickly scan the
opening of some paragraphs to look for the most compelling
arguments/experiments. I don't see how using something like Spritz I could be
more efficient. The point is that you don't need to read every single word,
even very quickly, to grasp the author's ideas. Maybe I am missing something ?

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superasn
For those who haven't had great success with Zethos/Spritz, can give
magicscroll.net a try. Another reading tool but very different technology.
I've found it quite easy to read books with it for some reason (unfortunately
it does not work with PDF or general text content.)

Like try this (click the play button at bottom right to start):

[http://www.magicscroll.net/#reader;md5=597e52af574ea413a5886...](http://www.magicscroll.net/#reader;md5=597e52af574ea413a5886342baaaa9ed)

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gren
Nice concept, It would be wicked if this could work with something
[http://store.neurosky.com/products/mindwave-1](http://store.neurosky.com/products/mindwave-1)
(an attention detector basically) and speed up when your attention raise! Also
the thing can detect your eye blink, and you basically want to stop a bit the
reader when this occurs ;-) I assume google glass already have thought about
that.

Future here we go!

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zk00006
I believe these speed-reading tools are missing the concept of meaning. While
the idea to fix the eyes allows to deliver more data to the retina, the linear
speed does not work well. It would be great to combine these methods with some
text processing algorithms that are able to extract the key words from a
sentence. While I am not expert in text processing I am convinced that methods
able to compress text into meaningful keywords must have been proposed in the
literature already. If not, it would be very interesting research. Those
keywords should be then presented longer to the reader, while the less
important words should be skipped.

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luisivan
I made a library that does the same a week ago:
[https://github.com/luisivan/spritzer](https://github.com/luisivan/spritzer)

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robobro
If someone were to make a Spritz-esque bookmarklet that added more to the
basic idea we've seen online, what would you consider to be useful additions?
I think that letting users select text and do a run of the highlighted area
would be great, or letting them click "pause" to jump the page down to the
currently displayed word would be cool too.

~~~
davidjhamp
I made one with those features(except that pause doesn't jump to that word)

[http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader-
bo...](http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader-bookmarklet/)

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kriro
I'd like to use this for PDF-papers. Rough benchmark that would be cool: Read
an entire conference paper (usually in the 6-8 pages range, bibliography can
probably be excluded for starters) in the time it currently takes me to read
the abstract :D

[if you build this you can probably sell it to one of the reference management
software vendors]

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camillomiller
Nice proof of concept (the concept being that sometimes the whole funding
thing is a bit difficult to properly understand). Now, a call to programmers:
why the heck there's still no readability-like chrome extension? After I saw
the spritz demo I thought that it would have been immediately consequential...

~~~
gkoberger
There's this (a bookmarklet):

[https://gun.io/blog/openspritz-a-free-speed-reading-
bookmark...](https://gun.io/blog/openspritz-a-free-speed-reading-bookmarklet/)

However, it no longer works due to him going over the Readability API limit.

~~~
davidjhamp
I made one too that has key bindings as well:
[http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader-
bo...](http://www.davidhampgonsalves.com/spritz-like-rsvp-reader-bookmarklet/)

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_asciiker_
Hello,

It looks looks, however Spritz went a little further, the sweet spot of the
human eye is a little to the left of the center, that is where the "red"
character should be. On your example you see the larger words do jump around a
bit and it is not as efficient.

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robertkrahn01
Another Spritz-like implementation: [http://lively-
web.org/users/robertkrahn/speedread.html](http://lively-
web.org/users/robertkrahn/speedread.html)

~~~
garretraziel
As a Smalltalk enthusiast, I am really glad to see lively-web in actual use.

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davidjhamp
I wrote one of these things(bookmarklet) but I never really use it. Reading in
this fashion while faster just isn't that enjoyable in my experience.

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pkhamre
How do I install and use it?

