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Show HN: Bionic Reading – Formats text to make it faster to read
- stevefan1999 5y agoInteresting. This indeed made me read faster than usual.
- smrtinsert 5y agoHonestly fixed word length per column independent of device or screen size is the #1 feature I wish for. I can't stand flow templates. When the nature of the paragraph changes per device it's very hard feel like you've been there before.
- k__ 5y agoWhy do fonts not use this technique?
- qnsi 5y agocan you share some kind of science that it works?
- renato_casutt 5y agoWe have just finished a study. The publication still needs some time. But I can already say in advance that 25% of the subjects get great benefits in the method. My finding before the study was that 10% of all readers gain an advantage in Bionic Reading. And 10% is already very much...I find
- suriyaG 5y ago10% of all readers find how much increase in reading speed? also, how is the recollection and retainability of the information?
- FrankZappa42 5y agoIs this similar to open dyslexic font? Or are open dyslexic font based on this?
- renato_casutt 5y agoBut Bionic Reading actually supports many people who have dyslexia. However, not in the form of a font, but in the way of highlighting within the text. A big advantage of Bionic Reading is that the reading setting can be adjusted individually by each reader. In other words, individual.
- drenvuk 5y agoI like this. I've always had to force jumping down line by line to pick up words if I was trying to speed read, but with the extra highlighting I'm picking them out and jumping almost effortlessly. It's pretty neat. I'm honestly wondering if this would make me lazy for reading non explicitly partway bolded text.
- renato_casutt 5y agoI am very happy to hear that. I don't think you will have problems if you can't apply BR. But you will probably find that the "reading pull" is less strong without Bionic Reading.
- doctoboggan 5y agoThere is a similar technology that flashes the words in place as you read. I remember it making the rounds a few years ago. https://spritz.com/ https://spritz.com/
- renato_casutt 5y agoYes, you are right. The problem with Spritz is that you lose the overview of the text and therefore you can't optimally absorb the context of the content. Some users have already confirmed this to me. But the technique is cool...
- loa_in_ 5y agoThere's also spreeder on Android in similar spirit which I found useful to read web content. The downside is I have to copy and paste it from the browser
- totetsu 5y agoThere are many good RSVP apps and browser plugins. I find it better for news or other things I want to skim read, than trying to power through a novel.
- renato_casutt 5y agoYou are right. The advantage of Bionic Reading is that you can customize your reading settings. I think if you want to read a book in a relaxed way, but you have dyslexia (10% of people), then Bionic Reading can help you.
- ajolly 5y agoAny preferences for plugins and apps these days? I used to use RSVP tech a decade ago in the Windows phone days, but have not seen great modern clients.
- Crazyontap 5y agoBtw spritz is an evil company who bullies software developers with their ridiculous and vague patents. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9046034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9046034
- camhart 5y agoJust reading the example paragraph, I did feel at times speed was increased, but there were times the highlighted letters caused my brain to assume the wrong word, and when that happened it took extra effort (& time) to focus on the actual word.
- renato_casutt 5y agoYes I understand that. Optimal is then if you have set your individual reading setting with Bionic Reading. And what you have to remember is that your brain has already absorbed the words. So your eye jumps back instead of gliding over the text. However, this will turn off and you will find that you understand the text without having read every letter.
- thanatos519 5y agoHave you considered tweaking the highlight length when the bold part is itself a complete word? For example with 'theists', 'the' would be bold by default, but maybe bolding 'th' or 'thei' would result in less confusion.
- blackbear_ 5y agoActually this made it harder for me to read. The text felt "bumpy", unlike normal in text where it felt smoother and flowing. Maybe it's just a matter of habit. Anyways, I don't believe speed-reading to be effective, especially for comprehension and long-term retention. The best and fastest way to get an overview of a written piece is not to read it faster, but to skip most of the content. Most of it is just supporting the core arguments, and can thus be skipped for an overview.
- corobo 5y agoI'd say it almost halves my reading speed. In regards to speed reading I've always been under the impression it means you take in entire lines/sentences in one go rather than reading faster, skipping the sub-vocalisation step. For instance the homepage of HN is a quick scan vertically down the page until a headline catches my eye as interesting, no real side to side eye movement needed unless the title is a bit long Maybe this brain reading faster than eyes thing is best aimed at sub-vocalisers? I'd be interested in knowing if the people this helps read 'out loud' in their heads
- renato_casutt 5y agoYes, corobo that can be that it prevents you from reading. However, I would argue that you are a speed reader. One test person in the study was also a speed reader. She had read two different texts. Once with and once without bionic reading. But her speed stayed at 800 wpm each time. But believe me, there are a lot of people who have difficulty with reading. Surely also in your circle of friends. And for some of them Bionic Reading can help.
- layer8 5y agoIt felt like listening to speech with constantly changing volume. Probably because bold is associated with shouting/strong emphasis.
- DantesKite 5y agoI felt the same way. It slows me down. But I imagine it would be very useful for dyslexic people. I have a family member who struggles to read; it's as if they have to consciously process what each character means. From that perspective, it's not so much speed reading, but bringing up people with slow reading to normal levels.
- dotancohen 5y agoI'm amazed at how much clearer the bionic-highlighted text is. For me the big difference was in first-pass comprehension, not speed. The website needs more attention to detail, this typo is one of the first things a visitor sees: > We humans store learned words and so just a few letters are enough to ecognize whole words.
- renato_casutt 5y agoThank you for your feedback. Sorry for the error. My english is not so good. Can you write me the sentence 100% correctly? That would be very kind of you.
- wartijn_ 5y agoecognize should be recognize
- hugh-avherald 5y agoecognize -> recognize (Though I'm not sure if the typo was intentional.)
- cpfohl 5y agoI had assumed it was intentional: Mch lk n cn rd wtht vwls.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThe sentence is perfectly fine, you just missed the "r" in "recognize".
- renato_casutt 5y agothank you so much...fixed
- dotancohen 5y agoI see that you've already got an answer to what needs to be corrected. If you would like, send to me an email (my gmail username is the same as my HN username) and if I spot anything else I'll reply back with corrections.
- thom 5y agoI normally have to make a conscious effort to speed read so this is intriguing. I’ve had a lot of success with Edge’s reader mode with verbs and nouns highlighted in different colours.
- renato_casutt 5y agoThank you for your feedback. Yes, this version of Bionic Reading is the beginning of the reading mode. Of course there are ways to structure the word types as well as the syllables. Its the BR verion1
- thom 5y agoI guess my only argument against these approaches is that I’d like to have a method that works for physical texts as well so practising speed reading seems the most impactful thing.
- Proddducts 5y ago
- renato_casutt 5y agoThank you for your feedback. I'm very glad you recognize the benefits of Bionic Reading. Best regards from the Swiss Alps, Renato
- crackercrews 5y agoPlease don't do this here. Your profile shows a single submission. It is a Show HN for the website you linked above.
- kizer 5y agoWoah. Much better comprehension reading the first example text.
- renato_casutt 5y agoThank you so much kizer...I am very pleased
- pxeger1 5y agoThis does indeed seem to work for me, but the repeated emphasis on the patents and trademarks makes me suspicious. It looks like a company who cares much more about patent royalties than about their invention - whom I would never be willing to give my money to. Having seen the principle, I could write a browser extension in an hour. I suppose I'll have to wait 25 years (or whatever the French patent expiry length is), though. If you want to read the patent (in French), it's here: https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/FR3052587 https://data.inpi.fr/brevets/FR3052587. I couldn't find the German patent (10 2017 112 916.2), but I'm guessing it's the same substance.
- rapnie 5y agoYes, I agree. I guess this technology isn't for everyone. This is a real bummer. They did not have to patent and trademark this method, which in principle is such a basic mechanism. Just had to productize their service really well so they'd take the lead in monetizing.
- renato_casutt 5y agoI am alone and I put all my money, time and work into BR. Visible is only a small part. But I think everyone decides for themselves what is best. But thank you for the critical feedback.
- rapnie 5y agoThank you for responding. Despite my criticism I'd like to say that the method is really working for me. So as an invention it is great.
- renato_casutt 5y agoI thank you for your criticism. This is the only way to move forward and I take it very seriously. Therefore I thank you! Best regards from the Alps Renato
- oauea 5y ago
- xupybd 5y agoWe were taught "speed reading" in my first year of an electronics diploma. This feels very similar. I found speed reading only good for searching through text. Comprehension and memory goes out the window when I try it. If I want to get information in fast text to speech at 4x speed is more effective.
- renato_casutt 5y agoYes Bionic Reading is not speed reading. Speed reading has to be learned and it is demonstrably difficult to verify. Bionic reading does not have to be learned, it happens intuitively. Because we humans read the way we read.
- Nowado 5y agoSurprisingly pleasant. I haven't speed read in a while, but this felt better than highlighting text, or centering word on screen (although those work better with audio support, but I guess that could be mixed together). Few questions: From what I understand BR figures out 'what part of the word is unique enough to be a good enough approximation of the word'. Is this somewhat context aware or generic (with parameters available for developer)? How focused are you on iOS?
- tluyben2 5y agoThis is how I speed read for decades (autodidact); I swoop over the page once with my eyes and then just jump over it more or less like they show here. Allows me to read multiple books per day.
- renato_casutt 5y agoAbsolutely tluyben2 Great...
- marginalia_nu 5y agoIt would be interesting to see what demands this places on the source material. There's a fair bit of work in say philosophy where for example the concepts being discussed may be things like relationships between things, or things themselves, or being, also unavoidably something that crops up in the actual discussion, you're comparing comparisons or saying that that that thing that is is. You kinda usually have to slow down considerably to break these things down to have any hope of actually understanding them.
- elloworld1221 5y agoI wonder how difficult it would be to turn this into a Calibre plug in to convert existing ebooks
- red0point 5y agoThe rules implemented are very simple (taken from the patent application [1], the exact numbers are configurable). If there are <= 3 letters, one letter is bold. If there are == 4 letters, two letters are bold. If there are > 4 letters, 40% of all letters are bold. There is this claim as the first text on the website: We are happy if as many people as possible can use the advantage of Bionic Reading. For this reason, Bionic Reading should be able to be integrated into existing apps and services. The benefit for the reader should be the main focus. If that is truly correct, why not publish these 3 rules? Why hide it behind multiple patent applications and trademarks? Why spend all this time and money on patents and an API that probably involve sending all text to some servers, just so that these 3 lines of code can be executed? [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102017112916A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/DE102017112916A1/en
- elil17 5y agoLooking at the example in one of the apps (Reeder 5) doesn’t work 100% the same as the patent. For example, neumann (a last name) is bolded as NEUMANn the first time it appears and NEUMann the second time it appears.
- sdoering 5y agoBeing a cynical person I would answer your questions with: Because money.
- renato_casutt 5y agoI decided to take out a patent a long time ago. Unfortunately I had to make bad experiences, which is why I now want to offer BR as API. With the rules it depends on whether it is short, medium or long words. But in principle it is simple. As simple as we humans read. Eye - brain - representation products (words)
- noeltock 5y agoGreat product that might get lost because of overthinking the business model (say that even as a fellow Swiss). Think the giga-opportunity here is for a chrome extension, releasing it for free or freemium won't interfere with your patent (and if you don't, someone else will, regardless of the legal aspects). Either way, congratulations on this innovation, it's elegant.
- monkeydust 5y agoI have started to watch more videos at > real-time speeds. Depends on the quality of the video but can get at least x1.25 and upto x1.75 without my brain frying. Instead of reading what if this was text->speech at a multiple?
- quaintdev 5y agoI follow this for Udemy/YouTube videos
- matsemann 5y agoI just wish most software were smarter about the speed ups. Naively playing everything X times faster can be weird. Either the pauses are too short, the words spoken too fast, or something. But it should dynamically stretch and squish more, I feel, to make it sound like a person actually speaking faster.
- traceroute66 5y ago> I have started to watch more videos at > real-time speeds. I started doing this too. But mostly because it helps with those videos where the speaker is speaking about an interesting topic but is speaking very slowly, or with large gaps or with many fillers. It helps making the viewing experience much more bearable.
- mrgill 5y agoMy default for watching any video is 2.0x. Up to 3.0x/3.5x.
- mihaic 5y agoWhile in general I find that speedreading is mostly for poor content, since our speed of information comprehension is slower than any reading, this seems to be the most effective implementation I've come across. It might help the website more if the testimonials themselves were in the same way.
- sdoering 5y agoI was actually not able to read their example text at all. I had to slow down, to read this slowly word, by word. I trained myself since my time at university to mark important parts in text (either with text marker in a book or with bold typesetting in a digital text). I then primarily scan only the bold/colored parts and skip over the non marked parts. So my eye/brain jumped from bold letters to bold letters. As these were not full words, I just had gibberish in my head. Maybe for the untrained reader this might work. I know that I am just anecdata.
- mdp2021 5y agoWhy are you patenting ~"Highlight the first half of a printed word", Renato? Do you think that is patent material?
- renato_casutt 5y agoHi mdp2021 I understand your skepticism. The point is that the reader needs a fixed point to absorb the text. That's why this definition is placed. As shared in other comments, I unfortunately had to make very bad experiences. And the responsibility I perceive among others Marco (feedback website), I do not want to jeopardize. But I understand your objections. Best regards from the Alps Renato
- Llamamoe 5y agoHow do you decide which letters to highlight? Is it the first half in every case? Did you conduct any trials to see whether this yields the fastest reading speeds?
- osullip 5y agoI was very impressed. To the point where I got scared about how fast I could read and if I was losing control of the content going into my brain. Is there an app that can 'un-bolden' letters so I can slow my brain back down.
- renato_casutt 5y agoHahaha... yes unfortunately there are countless apps that gum up and slow down the brain.
- sdoering 5y agoAre there any actual studies on the gained speed being done by Independent scientists? I could not finde anything on their (quite beautifully done) marketing/landing page. I see patent registrations, but no mention of any studies underpinning the claims being made. To me this smells like all the other pseudo-scientific BS marketing and product people are trying to spoon-feed me every day. Also as said in a sibling comment, for me it killed my reading speed. From their examples I would estimate by about half. So thanks, but no thanks - this is not an offering for me. But it will probably find its audience. I could imagine it will be a big hit in the self optimization scene.
- renato_casutt 5y agoWe have just completed the preliminary study but I cannot publish any results yet. And you are right, of course. It does not help everyone. That's the way it is. But there is a lot of feedback thanking us and hoping that it will be available to as many services as possible.
- sdoering 5y agoI don't doubt that this will help people. I know how it helped me to train myself in the way I read today during my university years. So as said - there will be people who benefit from this. Still - being an empiricist I just like to see independent and scientifically valid representative studies being done before I believe marketing claims. ;-)
- tarsinge 5y agoI don't have links to studies but last time I checked and from anecdotal experience reading speed with high comprehension is limited by information throughput in the brain. It's also why languages spoken faster carry less information per word, because the limit is information processing. To experience that if you are a good reader, you can try to speak out loud a sentence while memorizing a second sentence and see that you'll not have process and understand the words until you have spoken them, even if you have read and stored them (short sentences like in TFA, obviously doesn't work on HN).
- throwaway69123 5y agoPerfect example of why algorithms shouldn’t be patentable
- progx 5y agoWhy not create a basic free browser plugin for e.g. 100 Words of a page and a pro version with full page and more customization options? The rules seems to be simple, so i don't know if somebody uses an api for that.
- wccrawford 5y agoI couldn't find anyone else with my experience: No change at all. I wasn't faster or slower on either side, as far as I could tell.
- ryan-allen 5y agoA friend of mine from another country with a different teaching style, when I showed him some speed reading apps laughed, saying that he was taught not to sub-vocalise words, and he is a smart guy. So maybe you have something similar?`
- wccrawford 5y agoI had heard about that before, and I definitely try not to subvocalize now, so maybe that's the difference. I'm mainly surprised that so many people recognize it as definitely faster or slower, and so few that see no difference.
- debdut 5y agoWhat! This blew me. This magic happening before my eyes. Forget the negative comments here on HN, the fact that you had such an insight, it's awesome. Going constructive on the HN comments, if someone found something, you got a right to protect and earn from it anyway, charging for however a simple idea helps it spread and let's you do more innovation on it. But that said, maybe a library with paid access is a better idea than api which needs to travel across 14 seas and 7 oceans!
- debdut 5y agoThis React component library is monetized to heaven! [1] https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/pricing/ https://alvarotrigo.com/fullPage/pricing/
- chrismorgan 5y agoIt’s also obnoxious and utterly frustrating as an end-user. (I know that’s not the aspect of it you’re remarking on but rather the monetisation, but I find their demo just so painful and the entire idea quite ill-conceived. Scrolljacking is always bad. Stop trying to take over the page flow and just make it a normal page that I can scroll as I desire.)
- xvector 5y agoI think the idea is great but the greediness on display here kind of disgusts me. Here is something that could legitimately be useful for many people, help the consumption of human knowledge when open-sourced, but instead it is patented and monetized to the maximum extent. Super distasteful.
- chrismorgan 5y agoI believe we’re talking about different things. I’m talking about fullPage.js, but I think you’re talking about Bionic Reading.
- ryan-allen 5y agoIt was faster for me, I learned to read in Australia which apparently doens't have a very sophisticated reading education, sub-vocalisation kept us slow compared to other systems.
- renato_casutt 5y agoRyan-allen, I'm so glad to hear that. Best regards from the Alps, Renato
- Xophmeister 5y agoI wonder if "word" is the correct unit, here; perhaps "morpheme" would work better, especially for multi-morphemic words or in compound nouns (e.g., in German). I think "syllable" may be a bit too much, unless the purpose was to teach reading. For example: ANTIDISESTAblishmentarianism (initial 40% highlighted) vs. ANtiDisESTAblishMEntARianIsm (highlighting rules over morphemes) vs. AnTiDisEstAbLIshMEntArIAnIsm (highlighting rules over syllables) An API that provided this as a service would be less trivial. The lay-typographer in me really hates the look of it too. Aesthetics don't trump readability, but perhaps there's a middle ground where the font weight drops off (e.g., with exponential decay), rather than having the binary "bold vs. not bold".
- simonhamp 5y agoNot sure if this intentional or just because this site is unfinished, but the repetition of the same paragraph throughout the page probably has the effect of making you believe you've read it faster, but it's more likely just recent familiarity of those words in that order that is allowing your brain to skip ahead rather than a specific visual cue. I actually found the 'bumpiness' in reading a distraction and I had to read the paragraph a few times to truly get the meaning. So any speed gains from the reading methodology were lost during the understanding phase
- btbuildem 5y agoI had the same suspicion -- I think they'd do better to have different snippets of text across the different examples.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago> Bionic reading aims to encourage a more in-depth reading and understanding of written content by reading faster? I mean the examples are pretty compelling and it did feel like I was reading faster, but at the same time their goals are at odds - faster reading doesn't necessarily mean more attentive reading, or being able to absorb more information. Still, interesting technique. I just wish they made their examples / comparisons actual text instead of images; surely they can just write a snippet of JS or some HTML to render the effect in the browser itself. Or would that be giving up their secret sauce? Also if any of the authors are here, please get rid of the "small text in between big text", I'm not sure if I need to read the one and then the other, or refocus my eyes on the big then the small text.
- trh0awayman 5y agoIt was explained in the link title before the change - their hypothesis is that our eyes are the bottleneck - the brain can understand more quickly than we can read. So by speeding up our eyes, we can understand more information.
- kizer 5y agoI had better comprehension on the Bionic text right off the bat, personally.
- hunter-gatherer 5y agoI'm on mobile so maybe that is why, but I noticed that I skipped over the sentence a bit. As in, I didn't notice the periods and comma at first. Would bolding the punctuation marks cause any issues?
- btbuildem 5y agoI saw it as "reading with less effort" and "faster" is kind of a shorthand for "less likely to get bored waiting for my eyes to catch up". I'd be more likely to read a longer piece of text (average content, not something I'm deeply interested in) if it was "easier" to read -- I get through it faster, or have to make less effort to get to the end.
- 5y ago
- qwerty456127 5y agoThis seems obvious from the fact I love listening to audio books at 1.75-3x speed but hate actually reading because the latter feels too slow. It even feels hard to me to understand the information (let alone concentrate the attention) at the speed so low as the eyes can supply.
- r_hoods_ghost 5y agoAre there any specific, measurable claims (and evidence) being made here with regards to what this supposed to achieve? "[Encouraging] a more in depth reading and understanding of written content" is pretty vague. Does it help with recall? Memorization etc. Personally it reads like those "dyslexic" fonts which actually make reading harder for a lot of people.
- manbash 5y agoFor me at least, it made little difference. My brain refused to ignore the parts that aren't boldened. I think what I don't understand is the concept: "and so just a few letters are enough to recognize whole word". This isn't expressed in the example. The rest of the word isn't hidden, it's still there in my peripheral vision (?). It is basically the same as I normally read. If the unboldened parts of the words were actually discarded, I am not sure if I would be able to recognize all the original words, at least not efficiently and faster than the original.
- mekkkkkk 5y agoYou never look at every single character while reading, your eyes only dart between select tokens. Your peripheral vision and your brain fills in the blanks. I think the idea is to aid your brain quickly parsing these tokens. A nice side effect is that it also helps your vertical tracking of lines by adding more visual anchor points.
- snjy7 5y agoMy brain just automatically ignores the paragraph with the bold letters. I'm having to force myself to focus on reading it. Does anyone else experience the same?
- renato_casutt 5y agoI am very glad that Bionic Reading is being discussed in HN. I am aware that it cannot help everyone. But I also get a lot of feedback from people who are helped a lot by this reading mode. Imagine you have problems with reading. You don't realize what a huge hurdle that is until you talk to people who are affected. Being ashamed in front of society. The problem of learning new things. Being called stupid. And these are just a few examples of people affected. Therefore I thank you very much that you discuss the problem critically. Best regards from the Alps, Renato
- barroomhero 5y agoI'd love to see an utility on the site that I can paste a paragraph of text and run it through to see it in action.
- selfportrait 5y agoI saw the opacity features but I was curious to see if with that feature, the bold text could stay as-is, and the regular text could take on lower opacity so that the full word is still there but only the bold parts are in full color. The opacity demo showed the whole paragraph as taking on an opacity reduction. I’m wondering if making the regular letters less opaque would disrupt the flow or further help focus on the important bits in bold?
- toss1 5y agoNice work! This would be an awesome enhancement to Pocket- which already extracts web page texts into a lighter format - I'd probably read everything through that
- oauea 5y agoYou did such a service to society by patenting this. Bravo.
- mkl 5y agoI spotted a couple of language issues on the webpage. "most concise parts of words" doesn't make sense, as "concise" means brief or short. Maybe you meant "important"? "very great" isn't proper English.
- mrgill 5y agoShould've made a browser extension for Chrome/Firefox. Without that, how can this ever come to the browser?
- kwhitefoot 5y agohexomancer's script (elsewhere on this page) could be turned into a GreaseMonkey/Tampermonkey user script.
- DelightOne 5y agoWhat's the pricing on this?
- tarsinge 5y agoI can totally see how it could benefit some people but for me I don't find it works, I feel like it forces a slow on few letters words or group of words that I could have read in one glance. Also I tried a bit of speed reading and I feel like I already read faster than I can process information and that my eyes are not the bottleneck when deep reading.
- Ensorceled 5y agoThere is a cliff in speed reading (at least in my experience) where you're reading speed for a particular reading exceeds your ability to process and/or enjoy the words you are reading. Similar to audio books ... some podcasts/audiobooks I can listen to at 2.5x or higher and others I need to reduce to 1.25 or 1.5x. Some readers are already fast enough and I listen a 1x; Mary Robinette Kowal for instance.
- mrpf1ster 5y agoThis is a pretty interesting find, it did help me read faster. I think the website would be better served by having the example texts be different though.
- atagebu 5y agoThis is really interesting. I wonder how difficult it would be to have a set of "training texts" where the reader/user is presented with different parameters to observe optimum points for speed vs retention. Excited to read the study when it's published.
- woliveirajr 5y agoInteresting. When reading in paper and after training for speed reading, having those fixed points would slow me down. In computer screen I adjust the text, making it narrower, and can read fast. With pdfs and sites I can't do that so I read slower. In smartphones the screens are already too narrow and this technique works!
- krelian 5y agoThe samples are impressive. I would love to have some longer text to see how it really works and feels. Maybe apply it to some public domain text?
- krzysztof 5y agoI do hope that kindle and other ebook readers will incorporate your tech. Awesome idea!
- shgidi 5y agoIt look very cool. Is there any browser addon?
- taubek 5y agoThis reminds me of speed reading course that I took almost 30 years ago.
- Loic 5y agoAs a non native English speaker, this does not work. Maybe because the part of the brain used to read/write/listen/speak a non native language is not the same as a native language. I really feel that I need to focus more while reading the example paragraph with the bionic stuff. I tried the other examples, but I memorized enough of the text starting the 3rd example that I could not really infer anything. Putting the same text for all the examples is not really helpful in this case.
- cardamomo 5y agoAs a native English speaker, I also felt like I had to work harder to read the bionic text. I am first grade teacher and have taught many children to read. Bionic's principles and algorithm do not match what I understand about the science of reading. This just holds the first part of a word, regardless of what the letters are. I would want an algorithm that is smarter than that (and I certainly wouldn't use bionic in the classroom, regardless!).
- renato_casutt 5y agoHi cardamomo I understand your skepticism and thank you for your criticism. What you see so far from Bionic Reading is the base. Of course, children should still learn to read. Because only when children have acquired a vocabulary, their brain has the representation products. Reading is already very well researched. I absolutely agree with you on that. Unfortunately, people are reading worse and worse. There may be many different reasons for this. But I'm sure you agree with me that reading is a cultural asset that everyone must use. Who reads worse, has thereby no advantage. Doesn't it? Reading transports knowledge. That's why I think it's important to take a closer look at the way we read. That's why I get a lot of feedback from people who have dyslexia and can read better again with Bionic Reading. Thank you for teaching the children and best regards from the Alps, Renato
- phpnode 5y agoCool, here's a quick hack to try a similar technique with the comments in this thread (copy and paste into dev tools: $$('span.commtext').forEach(span => { const frag = document.createDocumentFragment(); span.textContent.split(/\s+/).forEach(word => { const len = Math.ceil(word.length * 0.3); const leading = document.createElement('strong'); leading.textContent = word.slice(0, len); const trailing = document.createTextNode(word.slice(len) + ' '); frag.appendChild(leading); frag.appendChild(trailing); }); span.parentNode.replaceChild(frag, span); })
- hexomancer 5y agoI made a version which works in all web pages, it is still very hacky though: function bionifyPage(){ function bionifyWord(word) { if (word.length == 1) { return word; } var numBold = Math.ceil(word.length * 0.3); // return "<div class=\"bionic-highlight\">" + word.slice(0, numBold) + "</div>" + + "<div class=\"bionic-rest\">" + word.slice(numBold) + "</div>"; return "<b>" + word.slice(0, numBold) + "</b>" + "<span>" + word.slice(numBold) + "</span>"; } function bionifyText(text) { var res = ""; if (text.length < 10) { return text; } for (var word of text.split(" ")) { res += bionifyWord(word) + " "; } return res; } function bionifyNode(node) { if (node.tagName == 'SCRIPT') return; if ((node.childNodes == undefined) || (node.childNodes.length == 0)) { if ((node.textContent != undefined) && (node.tagName == undefined)) { var newNode = document.createElement('span'); var bionifiedText = bionifyText(node.textContent) newNode.innerHTML = bionifiedText; if (node.textContent.length > 20){ node.replaceWith(newNode); } } } else { for (var child of node.childNodes) { bionifyNode(child); } } } bionifyNode(document.body); }
- phpnode 5y agoI think yours infringes the patent ;)
- captainbland 5y agoI read it and it did feel a little easier/quicker, but it's hard to discount it just being 'novelty' factor making it more engaging being the cause of that perception. But the real test would be a longer text.
- Terretta 5y agoSite images blocked for me, and no examples in HTML. Looks like “shortpixel.ai” blocked by AdGuard Base. “Data on Swiss servers”, but shortpixel.com and shortpixel.ai owned by ID Scout of Romania. Their Wordpress plugin and CDN both superficially ‘act like’ plenty of free beacon tracker type image hosts, though this service offers paid plans and copy paste data legalese doesn’t reference advertising/measurement/aggregation third parties. I haven’t the time to look into why AdGuard is blocking, but perhaps it’s that ad banner or ad injector companies like it: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/search?q=shortpixel https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/search?q=short...
- DeathArrow 5y agoWow, I want to patent 2 + 2 = 4
- numlock86 5y agoWhat's your point? If you are implying the patent is just about ceil(len*0.3) you completely missed the application. In contrast, if you make/invent something new that uses 2+2=4 as an underlying fundamental mechanism, go ahead.
- dugmartin 5y agoA small observation: all the "normal" sample text has low contrast with the page background and the kerning seems awfully narrow making it harder, for me at least, to read than normal text. I tried to inspect the text to play with the css but alas, the text is an image and doesn't allow experimentation. I did run it though Chrome's Lighthouse accessibility check and it agreed about the lack of contrast.
- xnorswap 5y agoI'd like to try this as an option in firefox's reader mode as that's the format in which I read most long texts. This did on the surface feel like it is a help for me, in particular not so much the reading speed but the 'pull' of the words meant I was less likely to get distracted halfway through a paragraph and tab away. (Yes, I suspect I may have undiagnosed adhd).
- kwhitefoot 5y agoJust use hexomancer's script. Paste it into the Firefox console, call bionifyPage(), switch to reader mode.
- folli 5y agoThis reminds me of BeeLine Reader: https://www.beelinereader.com/ https://www.beelinereader.com/
- mekkkkkk 5y agoI wonder how messy it would look to combine the two? BeeLine really works, especially in cases where the designer has disregarded the need for reasonable column widths. I feel this works too, but as with BeeLine the visual appearance is a bit jarring at first.
- gnicholas 5y agoBeeLine founder here; interested to see this. My first reaction was that the "before" text in the before/after demonstration is both thin and grey. It is well known that text that is too thin and too light-colored is not great to read. The text modification shown here makes certain letters easier to read, but it appears this is partially because the rest of the text is specifically difficult to read. The background of the page very light grey, it looks like, which would magnify this effect even more. I wonder what this would look like with a not-too-thin-font that is black or near-black. I also wonder what it looks like on a full-width paragraph, as the sibling commenter mentioned. Regardless, it's always nice to see innovation in this space!
- irutiw22 5y agoSince you work in this field, I'd be interested if you would really qualify this as innovation. I have posted already in several places in this thread about the fact that Bionic Reader is at least 3 years old already. Someone else also dug up the patent application: The rules to make the text bold in Bionic Reader in its simplest form (i.e. ignoring things like setting Saccade manually) apparently is just a very very simple if-else that takes 3 lines of code. Also, have you patented BeeLine as well?
- swissmanu 5y agoUsing Bionic Reading with Reeder on my iPad since the people behind these products decided to collaborate. Great stuff <3
- brap 5y agoA better way to make your text readable is to: 1. make it short 2. use simple words 3. use lists I feel 80% of text is just filler.
- andai 5y agoI often hear this sentiment in book reviews. "This book could have been expressed in the length of an article, but then they couldn't have published a book." I suppose the more common version is "this article could have been expressed as a tweet!"
- brap 5y agoEspecially videos, which often take 10min to get to the point.
- mspaper 5y agoI agree.
- aaomidi 5y agoWelp. You patented making letters bold. You literally made this technology inaccessible for decades to come now. Thanks for that.
- kranner 5y agoI have some feedback regarding the testimonial from “Sangeeth”, whose Memoji shows a Sikh person. Did the user choose their Memoji? The two don’t go together well for reasons of odd cultural differences in the Roman/Latin transliteration of sounds in the south and the north of India. The -th- cluster represents the dental t, IPA /t/, but only in South India. In the North the same sound is represented by -t-. Therefore you might find a Sikh named Sangeet, or a non-Sikh named Sangeeth, but a Sikh named Sangeeth? I’ve never seen a Sikh name using the -th- cluster in my life. There are Sikhs who grow up in South India of course but their names use the North Indian transliteration rules. What I’m trying to say is: if you chose the Memoji with a turban to show an Indian person, it doesn’t match the -th in the name. As an Indian my first reaction was that the testimonial was fake, for this reason.
- dymk 5y agoIt’s just an emoji, not a Memoji (https://emojipedia.org/man-wearing-turban-medium-dark-skin-tone/ https://emojipedia.org/man-wearing-turban-medium-dark-skin-t...) It’s probably a review written by somebody with a brown skin tone. Page authors don’t know the social intricacies of what constitutes Sikhs and chose this one as “close enough”.
- DiggyJohnson 5y agoThere’s probably some sort of important lesson here…
- dymk 5y agoMaybe, but Sangeeth is not here to tell us if they are Sikh or not, so it's hard to say. I think it's unfortunate that (at the time of writing) the comments about the product and its effectiveness are ranked lower than this discussion about the _possibility_ that a non-Sikh person has been represented as Sikh. If Sangeeth themselves had popped up in this thread to comment on the choice of emoji, then sure, but it's just somebody making some assumptions based on a 't' vs 'th' cluster in the name.
- MetaWhirledPeas 5y agoAre there more examples, perhaps with a smaller font?
- mmargerum 5y agoCoulda just had a simple demo on the landing page. I spent the requisite 2 minutes trying to figure out what you do and didn't figure it out.
- j_san 5y agoProps for the GDPR compliant Cookie decline button! :)
- sly010 5y agoNot 100% sure it's possible, but maybe you could turn this into a font family and license it. It would be a much better way to make money than an API that can be replaced with a 3 line function.
- namelosw 5y agoCould anyone explain the rationale behind it? It seems that how we represent the letters and the words has significant impacts on how easily our brains digest them. Also a bit of tangent, but I wonder, could fellow English native speakers generally skim books like less than three to five seconds on each page, and roughly get the idea of those pages? I'm a native speaker of Chinese and it's pretty easy for me to do it in Chinese, but there's no way for me to do the same in English despite I've been reading English for years.
- ada1981 5y agoSurely someone can do thus in CSS?
- mrwnmonm 5y agoI feel like I am "consuming" the words quickly, but there is no room for my brain to think.
- toastal 5y agoSo many questions: Why's the page so slow? Why do I need JavaScript for a non-interactive page? Why don't I get a noscript error?
- tksb 5y agoInteresting! I've been using this casually on iOS (via Reeder [1]) for at least a year. One thing that absolutely flips the effect on it's head (for me, personally) is the switch to "dark" mode, or simply light text on dark backgrounds vs. dark text on light backgrounds. I suspect this is likely a typographic side-effect, similar to traditional print where dark pages "swallow" light text where as the opposite happens when inverted. [1] https://www.reederapp.com https://www.reederapp.com
- togs 5y agoSeems neat, but is there any research to suggest that this works? I'm skeptical because I'm given a claim, "This will help you read faster", and then asked to test the claim, which primes me to think I am reading faster, regardless of whether I actually am.
- masters3d 5y agoHow long will it take for your brain to start considering this text representation as regular text block?
- mellosouls 5y agoTbh I scrolled down the page reading (and checked the about section), and am still none the wiser as to what exactly is supposed to be happening process-wise, and - assuming I'm supposed to be reading things more deeply, what the evidence for that is. At the very least I think that should all be clearer given the primary claim.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- visarga 5y agoI prefer TTS with 1.5x speed coupled with highlighting the current words, and restyling the text to have 160% line height. There's something about having both the sound and visual at the same time that allows deeper concentration.
- darau1 5y agoMy first thought was "is there an emacs mode?"
- carapace 5y agoThis presumes you're scanning lines but if you really want to speed read you should scan whole blocks of text as you draw the eye down, there should be little to no horizontal movement when you're really reading fast. - - - - An interesting and effective method of speed reading is Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). These days it's mostly used in the context of psychological/perception studies, but it came about as a I/O method for military machines IIRC. Anyway, the trick is you display text one word at a time, in the same location, so the eye doesn't have to move at all. With a little practice and some tweaking (i.e. slight extra delay after periods and commas, that sort of thing) you can read very very fast. (For me I could read faster than my internal mental voice can speak.) - - - - There's an interesting effect where you can take some text and, for each word longer than ~5 letters, you leave the first and last letter in place but scramble all the "interior" letters. The resulting text is still legible! (I'd give an example here but I'm too lazy. Exercise for the reader, eh?)
- ratrocket 5y ago> There's an interesting effect where you can take some text and, for each word longer than ~5 letters [...] I think you're referring to this (dubbed "Typoglycemia"): > Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are [...] It's sort of true (although there was never any research at Cambridge that anyone has been able to unearth), but it's way more limited that "any word longer than 5 characters". This is a good explanation of it (arbitrary link found after a search): https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-letters-cambridge-typoglycaemia https://www.sciencealert.com/word-jumble-meme-first-last-let... People seem to want it to be universally true, though. It's for sure an interesting phenomenon (and meta-phenomenon).
- carapace 5y agoAh! Well met! Thank you for digging that up and posting it.
- chsreekar 5y agoWould love a browser extension similar to distiller mode that uses this
- jvalencia 5y agoI'd love to see an Android app in the list.
- neilwilson 5y agoReminds me of the tricks in Buzan's Speed Reading Book[0] but using a computer rather than a stylus to guide the eye. [0] https://tonybuzan.com/product/the-speed-reading-book/ https://tonybuzan.com/product/the-speed-reading-book/
- daenz 5y agoWorks for me and my partner. Very impressive, I wish you the best. However, I think you're trying to capture something that's too big and elusive to be captured. If this improves peoples ability to consume information with a relatively trivial change (not calling your technology trivial, but relative to other infrastructure costs, it is), then there is no way that you won't see hundreds of spinoffs by companies and open source engineers, even if they are inferior products. And if you try suing them all, you will become the enemy in the public eye. How do you plan to make money at the scale that this system could apply at, without alienating the world by forcing text flow through your system or pay some kind of royalty?
- sweetheart 5y agoI found this to be an unbelievable improvement in reading for me. It was automatic and effortless. I cannot believe how much faster that helped me to read without sacrificing on comprehension. Unreal. Reading the non-bionic (?) text on the website suddenly felt like a sluggish chore, and for the first time I am realizing that I am actively using not insignificant amounts of energy to mentally parse text.
- renato_casutt 5y agoHi sweetheart I am very happy about that. Nice that you get the “reading pull” and thereby gain the benefits. Best regards from the Alps, Renato
- Dangeranger 5y agoI’ve used both Bionic Reading while on Reeder, and the Open Dyslexic font while on Kindle, for several years to similar effect. My personal finding is that it makes the work my eyes need to do to keep on the line, and move from line to line easier. But I will note that the largest increase in reading speed for me, up to 800 words per minute, came from single word focusing. There are tools, such as speed reader mode in Emacs, or an old browser extension called Squid, that take the readable text and put it all on one line, then move the text through a window that stays fixed on the screen. By training yourself to relax and not read the words aloud, I was able to increase my reading speed from around 200 wpm to over 800 wpm. The trick is to slowly ramp up the speed, and not just jump up to the fastest speed possible. It’s also important to remember to blink. Alternatively, text to speech works for to in a similar way, and I’ve found that I can handle 2.5x - 3.5x speeds after a few hours of training. As a bonus, nobody else can decider what you’re listening to, and you get some funny looks. Let me know if others have found similar techniques to work for them.
- Llamamoe 5y agoOut of curiosity, how do dyslexic friendly fonts work? Are they easier for everyone, or is it a case of compensating dyslexia related deficits specifically?
- gnicholas 5y agoThere are a couple popular dyslexic-friendly fonts, OpenDyslexic [1] and Dyslexie. [2] My understanding is that the first is free and the second is not. What they have in common is that both are quite heavy fonts (thick lines), and with a bit of extra kerning (space between letters). They are also designed to have 'b' and 'd' (and other mirror-image pairs) that do not look like mirror images. I have worked in this field for years, as the founder of BeeLine Reader. [3] We received a lot of requests to offer one of these fonts, and we've used OpenDyslexic for quite some time. I know some people really like it. At the same time, dyslexia researchers (especially those in the US) insist that dyslexia is not a visual condition, and that fonts cannot make a difference. I tend to believe that even if it is not an issue that is primarily visual, that doesn't meant that adjustments to how text is presented can't make things better. This seems to be the sense among (1) researchers outside the US, (2) individuals with dyslexia worldwide, and (3) many assistive technology or SPED workers in the US — despite what US-based researchers say. 1: https://opendyslexic.org/ https://opendyslexic.org/ 2: https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ https://www.dyslexiefont.com/ 3: https://www.beelinereader.com https://www.beelinereader.com
- talhof8 5y agoNot to be mean, but I did not understand anything from the landing page about what the product/service does. So confusing...
- dr_kiszonka 5y agoI really quite like both the idea and the website. Suggestion: on the EN version of the website, you could consider linking to EN App Store pages, e.g., https://apps.apple.com/app/fiery-feeds-rss-reader/id1158763303 instead of https://apps.apple.com/ch/app/fiery-feeds-rss-reader/id1158763303
- enduku 5y agoGreat work, congrats! Another app Beeline Reader[0] seems a lot similar to this. It was launched many years ago I suppose. All the best with the product! [0] https://www.beelinereader.com/ https://www.beelinereader.com/
- gnicholas 5y agoBeeLine founder here — I'd say we are similar in that we both work to improve visual tracking and speed up the reading process. BeeLine's focus is perhaps more on return sweeps, but in the grand scheme of things, we're both pushing in the same direction!
- Llamamoe 5y agoOut of curiosity, what exactly does BeeLine do, and how have you developed it? It seems to color the beginning and end of each line, so that your eyes naturally follow from one line to the next, is this correct? Have you tried and tested any other ideas?
- gnicholas 5y agoBeeLine improves visual tracking by displaying text with a color gradient, which wraps from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. Like Bionic Reader, it improves visual tracking across the line. It also improves visual tracking during the 'return sweep' — when you move your eyes from right to left, to find the new line. The colors are user-configurable, and we make first-party tools like browser plugins, [1] PDF converters, [2] and iOS apps. [3] We also partner with reading and education platforms like Blackboard [4], who have embedded our tech in their products. We do have a few other tricks up our sleeve, but for now this is the main event. It's not too shabby, and has won social impact awards from MIT Solve [5] and the United Nations Solutions Summit. [6] 1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifjafammaookpiajfbedmacfldaiamgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader/ifj... 2: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader-pdf-viewer/pmeknoingfjncbdhempgnkdgojickcko/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/beeline-reader-pdf... 3: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beeline-extension/id1571623734 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beeline-extension/id1571623734 4: https://ally.ac/covid19 https://ally.ac/covid19 5: https://solve.mit.edu/articles/meet-the-solver-teams-introducing-the-digital-inclusion-solver-class https://solve.mit.edu/articles/meet-the-solver-teams-introdu... 6: https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/meet-10-solution-makers-turning-local-action-into-global-ambition-at-the-un/ https://unfoundation.org/blog/post/meet-10-solution-makers-t...
- btbuildem 5y agoI like how this leverages the fact we don't have to read the entire word, or that letters in the middle of the word can be jumbled and we still read it correctly. Very cool insight in emphasizing the "important" parts of the words. For me at least, it seems to have worked - it felt like less effort to glide over the paragraph of text and take in the content. As far as it becoming a product.. I'm sorry, but people will immediately rip this off. Someone will make a free browser extension, or add this to an existing one like Outline / Mercury Reader / etc. To enforce patents you have to have money to pay the lawyers, so for small fry they're kind of useless. Very cool idea all the same, and I would love to see this embedded in anything that displays text.
- sedivy94 5y agoI’ve been consistently suspicious of speed-reading solutions. I have a loud inner voice that insists on annunciating everything that is read before comprehension takes place. Speed-reading typically outpaces my inner voice. Like many others, I scan over sentences multiple times. This has made me more a apt reader technical writing than creative or conversational writing. Maybe I’m yet another smooth-brain falling for the placebo effect, but I truly perceived an increase in reading speed that did not outpace my inner voice. Nice!
- schwartzworld 5y agoDid you know that We humans store learned words and so just a few letters your brain reads faster are enough to recognize whole words. than your eye? I'm embarrassed how long this took me to understand.
- bmn__ 5y agoFTA: > this book author did not write his texts in written German, but in a form of the Swiss language, which I did not understand with reading. So I noticed that I have great difficulties to read the text. This makes me angry. The German Swiss have deprived themselves of their own culture by normalising the practice of writing a German variety that is not theirs, and that is not spoken. The other three Swiss ethnicities wouldn't dream of doing such a nonsense. It is nigh 100 years past time that someone who cares – following the footsteps of Adelung, Karadžić, Manzoni – pushes through with https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieth-Schreibung https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieth-Schreibung and takes it to the schools, so that in future generations people like Renato won't have trouble reading their own native language, and the pupils of Romandy learn a (secondary) language that is actually useful for orally communicating with their fellow countrymen, unlike what happens today.
- irutiw22 5y agoFor everyone who think this is new stuff: It is not new. There was another company in the German speaking space, Vienna more exactly, see craftworks.at, that offered almost the exact same product already back in 2019, perhaps even earlier, also called "Bionic Reading". In the current version of the website this does not appear, but it is saved in archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190119032121/http://br.craftworks.at/ https://web.archive.org/web/20190119032121/http://br.craftwo... Perhaps the author of the current offering worked at craftworks at that time, then left and took his IP with him, I don't know.
- throwawaybutwhy 5y agoThe thing is, this (and craftworks.at or whatever) is still not a fully polished technology. It probably can be optimized in a bunch of ways: * Less drastic transitions between accentuated text and the rest * An ML algorithm to select quantifiably better patterns (with distillation if necessary) * Enrolling visually- and cognitively-impaired persons (e.g.dyslexics) into the study to avoid undercutting accessibility We've been doing printing and written/illuminated books for many centuries, and statistical readability studies for the last 80 years or so. If a variation of this technique is better than the existing 'flat' type (even with ligatures), NASA/DARPA/NIH would be investigating it shortly.
- killermouse0 5y agoIs there a Chrome or Firefox browser add-on?
- ajolly 5y agoAm curious about how this compares to RSVP (rapid serial visualization perception) reading. (Or Android options?)
- yonz 5y agoWoah