13 ms·

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. T

But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. Some years ago I worked on an accessibility project for an app and website designed for people with disabilities. One of the team members had low vision, and used a screen reader that must have been set to 3x or even higher. I usually listen to YouTube and podcasts at 1.5-2x and I could barely understand the audio. He seemed surprised, which indicated to me that 3x+ was the norm for people in his circle. I wonder if his ability was trained through years of using fast screen readers, vs. a lower visual processing load leads to better audio processing, or some other explanation.

vlovich123 7y ago
Yes. Took me a while but I can comfortably understand 2x speed and now 1x podcasts seem weird like they're talking super slow. I would imagine it's something you just train even more out of necessity.
liability 7y ago
I typically use TTS near 2.5x (I turn it up when I'm alert and down when I'm tired.) It's definitely a learned skill; a few years ago I started at 1x and struggled even with that. Every couple of months, take a moment to reflect on your comprehension. Is it currently easy for you to understand the audio? If yes, then crank it up a little bit until it's noticeably more difficult. Repeat this process periodically over a year or so and before you know it, it'll be set pretty damn quick.
dual_basis 7y ago
I can watch YouTube content at 3x without issue. I did this without much intentional effort - I simply downloaded an extension which allows me to speed up the video in increments of 0.1x using a keyboard shortcut. Whenever it felt slow I would speed it up, and whenever it felt too fast I would slow it down. Without paying much attention to the actual numbers I had reached over 3x within a month or so.
- fossuser 7y ago
  Is there a trick to get it above 2x (which is the cap in the UI). It'd be nice when watching videos of congress.
  - NoodleIncident 7y ago
    The extension he probably used is Video Speed Controller; it works on any HTML5 video, and you're not limited by whatever UI they've wrapped around that built-in functionality.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    I do it via `document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.0` in the dev console. You can up arrow to it similar to a normal terminal on the next video. The nice thing about this is you can put any float in e.g. 3.333. There are also extensions of course.
    - aepiepaey 7y ago
      You can also put this: javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('video').playbackRate=3.0;})(); as a bookmark on your bookmarks bar.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Streaming and download/playback tools can offer greater flexibility. I typically use mpv, though other options are mps-youtube, or for download + playback, youtube-dl and xine, mplayer, mpv, mps, or VLC. I find I can typically listen at 1.25 - 1.75 readily. Exceptionally poor content I'll bump to 2x. I don't generally go much above that unless I'm fast-forward scanning video for specific content.
  - lozf 7y ago
    Opening directly in `mpv` gives a wide range of speed control, has keyboard shortcuts for everything, and as an added bonus, skips ads by default.
  - systemcluster 7y ago
emilga 7y ago
Here’s a blind programmer using Visual Studio with a ridiculously fast TTS: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc
- ilamont 7y ago
  Yes, it was like this video (scroll ahead to 1 minute mark).
- daenz 7y ago
  This makes me emotional.
  - v64 7y ago
    Same. It really makes you realize what we take for granted as sighted developers. I can't imagine what the learning curve was like for him, as he lost his sight at age 7, long before many of these accessibility technologies existed. [1] [1] https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/saqib-shaikh-on-technology-and-inclusion-creating-an-ai-future-with-possibilities-for-all/ https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/saqib-shaikh-on-tec...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.
  - liability 7y ago
    Start slow, and build up your tolerance to it overtime. If you try to jump into the deep end, you'll just make yourself disappointed.
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      I'm reasonably good at listening to sped-up audio, personally, so this wasn't really an issue for me. I was just providing anecdotal reasoning of why TTS users may set their audio speed to something that might sound unreasonable: it takes forever to navigate the interface otherwise.
colechristensen 7y ago
It depends on the speaker. Some speakers are particularly slow with lots of long pauses and others are faster. I think anyone can get to 3x but it takes some time to adjust to faster and faster speeds. It also depends on what you are doing while listening. Distractions or listening while doing something else (driving for example) lowers my ability to comprehend. For example on the interstate without much traffic I'll listen to audiobooks at 3x, but in a city or a crowded highway I have to slow it down.
- Swizec 7y ago
  Overcast has a great feature where it cuts out pauses and otherwise leaves the speed intact. It easily speeds up podcasts by 30% and more
  - liability 7y ago
    FYI if anybody is interested in doing this without an app, check out ffmpeg's silenceremove filter.
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    Most decent podcast players also support this.
knzhou 7y ago
I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines. I just don't get the point. If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low. Any content that can be sped up that much without loss is not worth listening to in the first place. You're just skipping the trite cliches, filler, and obvious facts. I can read fast, and I typically go through fluffy NYT bestseller nonfiction at 600 WPM. But when I do this I constantly have a sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting my time. When I read a good book full of new ideas, I barely go at 150 WPM, but the time always feels well-spent.
- mLuby 7y ago
  I imagine it's a compromise between cutting through the fluff and using the primary source material. You could just read the plot synopsis or watch the highlights, but sometimes those don't convey build-up, suspense, or other data that are hard to losslessly compress. Being comfortable with the "boilerplate" of a given medium or genre usually lets you skim or skip it to jump right into the good stuff.
- liability 7y ago
  > . If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low. I 'read' your comment using TTS at 3x. What does that say about the information density of your comment? (Little to nothing. TTS at that speed is still marginally slower that I normally read with my eyes. Human speech is generally much slower than is necessary to be understood.)
  - knzhou 7y ago
    That's a good point, 3x speaking speed is reading speed, so there's nothing unusual about using it on comments largely intended to be read. That makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense to me is consuming things that have a _set_ speed, such as video/TV or lectures, at a dramatically faster speed.
tfha 7y ago
If you close your eyes listening comprehension goes way up. I top out around 2x if I have to look but with my eyes closed I can get full comprehension at 3x+ If it's a technical talk or something I'll still pause often too reflect on what was said, but I can hear full sentences just fine at >3x with my eyes closed.
ururi82jrjfrj 7y ago
Seems reasonable: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-t...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
microcolonel 7y ago
Depends on the natural speed of the speaker, but I listen to most podcasts and YouTube commentary/narrative at 2x. Podcasts sometimes in the 3x range. Sometimes it's worth slowing down to 1.5x to give myself a bit of time to process the ideas, though slowing below that sometimes hurts comprehension. Side note: I find that YouTube in Chrome has the best pitch-preserving time stretching filter, and I've neglected all this time to figure out what exactly they use to accomplish that. I'd love to add that to mpv, if it's not already there.
kccqzy 7y ago
It's easy to train yourself to do that though. Just find your favorite audiobook and listen to it daily. First listen to it at 1.5x, then adjust to 2x after a few days, then 2.5x after a few more days etc. You'd be surprised how fast your brain can actually process the information. Personally when I did this I feel irritated when I speak because my sped-up audiobooks have conditioned me into thinking I should be speaking at that rate, but it's just not possible for my mouth and tongue to move that fast physically.
- dexterdog 7y ago
  I recommend. .2 step increases as .5 is too much. I also recommend silence skipping if your player supports it.
Iv 7y ago
That quote seems to imply that they have not measured the maximum speed to receive information but the speed at which we are comfortable outputing it. There is no shortage of people training to receive a lot of information at once, and 39 bits per second seems to me on the lower end of what some video games require but in terms of constructed, linguistic output? They may be on to something there. Fast chatters are not faster thinkers. I have yet to see people exchanging thought at a higher rate then usual.
soulofmischief 7y ago
> I wonder if his ability was trained through years of using fast screen readers, vs. a lower visual processing load leads to better audio processing, or some other explanation. While I'm sure his visual cortex picked up some slack, I'm willing to bet it's mostly just through training. We just aren't trained for faster communication. I've known blind people and they are the same way with their readers.
samstave 7y ago
I listen to youtube videos at 200% What do i win???
thrwayxyz 7y ago
I'm fully sighted but I use espeak tts at around 1000wpd for fluff text like ecnomist articles and 300wpm for heavy going text like the text sections of math books. I also watch most video at 2/3 times the speed since the skills seem transferable.
- sabujp 7y ago
  what flags do you use for espeak, just -s 1000 seems incomprehensible to me
  - thrwayxyz 7y ago
    -p 100 -s 1000 -v male7
CAMLORN 7y ago
I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and the market now strongly prefers the former because hardware can now support i.e. concatenative synthesis. 1219 is a record as far as I know. We measured it explicitly by getting the screen reader to read a passage and dividing. I spent months working up from 800 to do it and lost the skill once I stopped (there was a marked level of decreased comprehension post 1000, but I was able to program there; still, in the end, not worth it). When I try to described the required mental state it comes out very much like I'm on drugs. Most of us who reach 800 or so stay there, though not always that fast for i.e. pleasure reading (I do novels at about 400). it's built up slowly over time, either more or less explicitly. I did it because I was in high school doing muds and got tired of not being able to keep up; it took about 6-8 months of committing to turn the synth faster once a week no matter what, keeping it there and dealing with a day or two of mild headaches. Note that for most blind people these days, total synthesis time per day is around 10+ hours; this stuff replaces the pencil, the novel, etc. Others just seem to naturally do it. You have little choice, it's effectively a 1 dimensional interface, so from time to time you find a reason to bump the knob. And that's enough. Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill. 0: https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reordering/ https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reord...
- CAMLORN 7y ago
  And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I still sometimes have to remember that other people can't digest technical content at the rate I say it and remember to slow down. A good way to bring it out is to have me try to explain a technical concept that I understand really well. I have the common problem in that situation of not being able to talk as fast as I think, but I also seem to have the ability to assemble words faster in a sort of tokenize/send to vocal cords sense once I know what I want to say. To me, the fact that this does in fact seem to be bidirectional at least some is more interesting than that I can listen fast.
devnulloverflow 7y ago
Well I'm sure the ability requires training, but I wonder if it is specific to screen readers. Consider what you quote: > we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts Now the amount of relevant info on a screen is typically small enough that a sighted person can zero in on it at a glance and perhaps just click a button without thinking. I.e. the amount of info that deserves "gathering our thoughts" is typically very small. So if that is the bottle-neck, your colleague can keep cranking up the audio speed until low-level processing audio becomes the bottle-neck, which is a regime that sighted people never deal with even, not even the nerds who speed up their Joe Rogan podcasts.
DoctorOetker 7y ago
>But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. The deduction that is quoted does not follow: speeding up audio recordings with 120% results pressing both the auditory system as the language and thought systems (or any other potential bottleneck) to be sped up proportionally since it's a pipeline. Similarily the posted article (I have yet to read the original one) states in the title that "human speech" has a universal transmission rate, but the research tested reading not speech, so this may or may not be true. Perhaps the bottleneck is human speech, with the side effect that listening is never trained beyond the typical speech rate limit. (in this case the higher speed syllable languages would be easier to pronounce fast, and the lower speed ones harder to pronounce fast) Perhaps the bottleneck was in the visual burden of reading, a language that encodes more bits per syllable implies more types of syllables, which irrespective of size or number of characters puts a classification demand on the visual system (classifying a symbol coming from a set of only 2 symbols will be easier, but will require more classification instances than classifying from a large set of characters but with fewer classification instances). Perhaps the bottleneck was again in speech during reading by subconscious vocalizing of the text. Perhaps the bottleneck was in the auditory "speech to syllable" classification. Perhaps the bottleneck was in parsing text. Perhaps the bottleneck was in "accessing thoughts" etc. So it is rather hard to identify where the bottleneck is located without having a means of detecting where in the brain the "incoming queue is full" vs "incoming queue is waiting" during speaking, listening, reading. And which of these 3 causes this universal bottleneck (since I gave 2 examples of how an apparent bottleneck in reading could stem from not being trained beyond a possible universal bottleneck in speaking rate...)
ssalka 7y ago
For me I imagine the bottleneck would rather be how quickly I can translate my thoughts into speech. Oftentimes I will start out talking to myself to explain a topic, only to eventually digress into my "mental monologue" because I start to process thoughts faster than I can say them.
mlang23 7y ago
I am blind, but I am not a primary speech synthesis user, I prefer tactile braille. However, I know a number of people which are using their speech synthesizers at rates similar to what you described above. My theory/experience with this phenomenon is, that a speech synthesizer never makes any errors. When it pronounces a word, it will do so exactly the same way everytime the same word comes up. So the learning effect after a while is a bit higher then when you listen to a human. Humans will always have slight variation in how they pronounce the same word. So, as I understand it, you can "learn" to listen to your speech synthesizer on a fast rate more effectively then you would be able to listen to a fast human speaker. And yes, I also listen to YouTube talks and audiboosk at about 1.5-2x rate. So I guess 80 bits per second is relatively easily doable for the receiver.
not_a_cop75 7y ago
Probably this is a healthy reminder of how the brain optimizes and uses sections of itself. Without the need for vision, those cranial areas can be better used for other things.

vlovich123 7y ago

Yes. Took me a while but I can comfortably understand 2x speed and now 1x podcasts seem weird like they're talking super slow. I would imagine it's something you just train even more out of necessity.

liability 7y ago

I typically use TTS near 2.5x (I turn it up when I'm alert and down when I'm tired.) It's definitely a learned skill; a few years ago I started at 1x and struggled even with that. Every couple of months, take a moment to reflect on your comprehension. Is it currently easy for you to understand the audio? If yes, then crank it up a little bit until it's noticeably more difficult. Repeat this process periodically over a year or so and before you know it, it'll be set pretty damn quick.

dual_basis 7y ago

I can watch YouTube content at 3x without issue. I did this without much intentional effort - I simply downloaded an extension which allows me to speed up the video in increments of 0.1x using a keyboard shortcut. Whenever it felt slow I would speed it up, and whenever it felt too fast I would slow it down. Without paying much attention to the actual numbers I had reached over 3x within a month or so.

fossuser 7y ago
Is there a trick to get it above 2x (which is the cap in the UI). It'd be nice when watching videos of congress.
- NoodleIncident 7y ago
  The extension he probably used is Video Speed Controller; it works on any HTML5 video, and you're not limited by whatever UI they've wrapped around that built-in functionality.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  I do it via `document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.0` in the dev console. You can up arrow to it similar to a normal terminal on the next video. The nice thing about this is you can put any float in e.g. 3.333. There are also extensions of course.
  - aepiepaey 7y ago
    You can also put this: javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('video').playbackRate=3.0;})(); as a bookmark on your bookmarks bar.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Streaming and download/playback tools can offer greater flexibility. I typically use mpv, though other options are mps-youtube, or for download + playback, youtube-dl and xine, mplayer, mpv, mps, or VLC. I find I can typically listen at 1.25 - 1.75 readily. Exceptionally poor content I'll bump to 2x. I don't generally go much above that unless I'm fast-forward scanning video for specific content.
- lozf 7y ago
  Opening directly in `mpv` gives a wide range of speed control, has keyboard shortcuts for everything, and as an added bonus, skips ads by default.
- systemcluster 7y ago

emilga 7y ago

Here’s a blind programmer using Visual Studio with a ridiculously fast TTS: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc

ilamont 7y ago
Yes, it was like this video (scroll ahead to 1 minute mark).
daenz 7y ago
This makes me emotional.
- v64 7y ago
  Same. It really makes you realize what we take for granted as sighted developers. I can't imagine what the learning curve was like for him, as he lost his sight at age 7, long before many of these accessibility technologies existed. [1] [1] https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/saqib-shaikh-on-technology-and-inclusion-creating-an-ai-future-with-possibilities-for-all/ https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/saqib-shaikh-on-tec...
saagarjha 7y ago
I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.
- liability 7y ago
  Start slow, and build up your tolerance to it overtime. If you try to jump into the deep end, you'll just make yourself disappointed.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    I'm reasonably good at listening to sped-up audio, personally, so this wasn't really an issue for me. I was just providing anecdotal reasoning of why TTS users may set their audio speed to something that might sound unreasonable: it takes forever to navigate the interface otherwise.

colechristensen 7y ago

It depends on the speaker. Some speakers are particularly slow with lots of long pauses and others are faster. I think anyone can get to 3x but it takes some time to adjust to faster and faster speeds. It also depends on what you are doing while listening. Distractions or listening while doing something else (driving for example) lowers my ability to comprehend. For example on the interstate without much traffic I'll listen to audiobooks at 3x, but in a city or a crowded highway I have to slow it down.

Swizec 7y ago
Overcast has a great feature where it cuts out pauses and otherwise leaves the speed intact. It easily speeds up podcasts by 30% and more
- liability 7y ago
  FYI if anybody is interested in doing this without an app, check out ffmpeg's silenceremove filter.
- dexterdog 7y ago
  Most decent podcast players also support this.

knzhou 7y ago

I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines. I just don't get the point. If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low. Any content that can be sped up that much without loss is not worth listening to in the first place. You're just skipping the trite cliches, filler, and obvious facts. I can read fast, and I typically go through fluffy NYT bestseller nonfiction at 600 WPM. But when I do this I constantly have a sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting my time. When I read a good book full of new ideas, I barely go at 150 WPM, but the time always feels well-spent.

mLuby 7y ago
I imagine it's a compromise between cutting through the fluff and using the primary source material. You could just read the plot synopsis or watch the highlights, but sometimes those don't convey build-up, suspense, or other data that are hard to losslessly compress. Being comfortable with the "boilerplate" of a given medium or genre usually lets you skim or skip it to jump right into the good stuff.
liability 7y ago
> . If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low. I 'read' your comment using TTS at 3x. What does that say about the information density of your comment? (Little to nothing. TTS at that speed is still marginally slower that I normally read with my eyes. Human speech is generally much slower than is necessary to be understood.)
- knzhou 7y ago
  That's a good point, 3x speaking speed is reading speed, so there's nothing unusual about using it on comments largely intended to be read. That makes perfect sense. What doesn't make sense to me is consuming things that have a _set_ speed, such as video/TV or lectures, at a dramatically faster speed.

tfha 7y ago

If you close your eyes listening comprehension goes way up. I top out around 2x if I have to look but with my eyes closed I can get full comprehension at 3x+ If it's a technical talk or something I'll still pause often too reflect on what was said, but I can hear full sentences just fine at >3x with my eyes closed.

ururi82jrjfrj 7y ago

Seems reasonable: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-the-blind-and-deaf/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-t...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

microcolonel 7y ago

Depends on the natural speed of the speaker, but I listen to most podcasts and YouTube commentary/narrative at 2x. Podcasts sometimes in the 3x range. Sometimes it's worth slowing down to 1.5x to give myself a bit of time to process the ideas, though slowing below that sometimes hurts comprehension. Side note: I find that YouTube in Chrome has the best pitch-preserving time stretching filter, and I've neglected all this time to figure out what exactly they use to accomplish that. I'd love to add that to mpv, if it's not already there.

kccqzy 7y ago

It's easy to train yourself to do that though. Just find your favorite audiobook and listen to it daily. First listen to it at 1.5x, then adjust to 2x after a few days, then 2.5x after a few more days etc. You'd be surprised how fast your brain can actually process the information. Personally when I did this I feel irritated when I speak because my sped-up audiobooks have conditioned me into thinking I should be speaking at that rate, but it's just not possible for my mouth and tongue to move that fast physically.

dexterdog 7y ago
I recommend. .2 step increases as .5 is too much. I also recommend silence skipping if your player supports it.

Iv 7y ago

That quote seems to imply that they have not measured the maximum speed to receive information but the speed at which we are comfortable outputing it. There is no shortage of people training to receive a lot of information at once, and 39 bits per second seems to me on the lower end of what some video games require but in terms of constructed, linguistic output? They may be on to something there. Fast chatters are not faster thinkers. I have yet to see people exchanging thought at a higher rate then usual.

soulofmischief 7y ago

> I wonder if his ability was trained through years of using fast screen readers, vs. a lower visual processing load leads to better audio processing, or some other explanation. While I'm sure his visual cortex picked up some slack, I'm willing to bet it's mostly just through training. We just aren't trained for faster communication. I've known blind people and they are the same way with their readers.

samstave 7y ago

I listen to youtube videos at 200% What do i win???

thrwayxyz 7y ago

I'm fully sighted but I use espeak tts at around 1000wpd for fluff text like ecnomist articles and 300wpm for heavy going text like the text sections of math books. I also watch most video at 2/3 times the speed since the skills seem transferable.

sabujp 7y ago
what flags do you use for espeak, just -s 1000 seems incomprehensible to me
- thrwayxyz 7y ago
  -p 100 -s 1000 -v male7

CAMLORN 7y ago

I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and the market now strongly prefers the former because hardware can now support i.e. concatenative synthesis. 1219 is a record as far as I know. We measured it explicitly by getting the screen reader to read a passage and dividing. I spent months working up from 800 to do it and lost the skill once I stopped (there was a marked level of decreased comprehension post 1000, but I was able to program there; still, in the end, not worth it). When I try to described the required mental state it comes out very much like I'm on drugs. Most of us who reach 800 or so stay there, though not always that fast for i.e. pleasure reading (I do novels at about 400). it's built up slowly over time, either more or less explicitly. I did it because I was in high school doing muds and got tired of not being able to keep up; it took about 6-8 months of committing to turn the synth faster once a week no matter what, keeping it there and dealing with a day or two of mild headaches. Note that for most blind people these days, total synthesis time per day is around 10+ hours; this stuff replaces the pencil, the novel, etc. Others just seem to naturally do it. You have little choice, it's effectively a 1 dimensional interface, so from time to time you find a reason to bump the knob. And that's enough. Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill. 0: https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reordering/ https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reord...

CAMLORN 7y ago
And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I still sometimes have to remember that other people can't digest technical content at the rate I say it and remember to slow down. A good way to bring it out is to have me try to explain a technical concept that I understand really well. I have the common problem in that situation of not being able to talk as fast as I think, but I also seem to have the ability to assemble words faster in a sort of tokenize/send to vocal cords sense once I know what I want to say. To me, the fact that this does in fact seem to be bidirectional at least some is more interesting than that I can listen fast.

devnulloverflow 7y ago

Well I'm sure the ability requires training, but I wonder if it is specific to screen readers. Consider what you quote: > we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts Now the amount of relevant info on a screen is typically small enough that a sighted person can zero in on it at a glance and perhaps just click a button without thinking. I.e. the amount of info that deserves "gathering our thoughts" is typically very small. So if that is the bottle-neck, your colleague can keep cranking up the audio speed until low-level processing audio becomes the bottle-neck, which is a regime that sighted people never deal with even, not even the nerds who speed up their Joe Rogan podcasts.

DoctorOetker 7y ago

>But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. The deduction that is quoted does not follow: speeding up audio recordings with 120% results pressing both the auditory system as the language and thought systems (or any other potential bottleneck) to be sped up proportionally since it's a pipeline. Similarily the posted article (I have yet to read the original one) states in the title that "human speech" has a universal transmission rate, but the research tested reading not speech, so this may or may not be true. Perhaps the bottleneck is human speech, with the side effect that listening is never trained beyond the typical speech rate limit. (in this case the higher speed syllable languages would be easier to pronounce fast, and the lower speed ones harder to pronounce fast) Perhaps the bottleneck was in the visual burden of reading, a language that encodes more bits per syllable implies more types of syllables, which irrespective of size or number of characters puts a classification demand on the visual system (classifying a symbol coming from a set of only 2 symbols will be easier, but will require more classification instances than classifying from a large set of characters but with fewer classification instances). Perhaps the bottleneck was again in speech during reading by subconscious vocalizing of the text. Perhaps the bottleneck was in the auditory "speech to syllable" classification. Perhaps the bottleneck was in parsing text. Perhaps the bottleneck was in "accessing thoughts" etc. So it is rather hard to identify where the bottleneck is located without having a means of detecting where in the brain the "incoming queue is full" vs "incoming queue is waiting" during speaking, listening, reading. And which of these 3 causes this universal bottleneck (since I gave 2 examples of how an apparent bottleneck in reading could stem from not being trained beyond a possible universal bottleneck in speaking rate...)

ssalka 7y ago

For me I imagine the bottleneck would rather be how quickly I can translate my thoughts into speech. Oftentimes I will start out talking to myself to explain a topic, only to eventually digress into my "mental monologue" because I start to process thoughts faster than I can say them.

mlang23 7y ago

I am blind, but I am not a primary speech synthesis user, I prefer tactile braille. However, I know a number of people which are using their speech synthesizers at rates similar to what you described above. My theory/experience with this phenomenon is, that a speech synthesizer never makes any errors. When it pronounces a word, it will do so exactly the same way everytime the same word comes up. So the learning effect after a while is a bit higher then when you listen to a human. Humans will always have slight variation in how they pronounce the same word. So, as I understand it, you can "learn" to listen to your speech synthesizer on a fast rate more effectively then you would be able to listen to a fast human speaker. And yes, I also listen to YouTube talks and audiboosk at about 1.5-2x rate. So I guess 80 bits per second is relatively easily doable for the receiver.

not_a_cop75 7y ago

Probably this is a healthy reminder of how the brain optimizes and uses sections of itself. Without the need for vision, those cranial areas can be better used for other things.