[mbrock]

I think this kind of thing is pretty interesting... For me, the reason I can't use it for most stuff I read is that I often need more time to process/understand certain words and names. On the first article from Instapaper that I tried this on, I was fed a sentence containing the words "doxological peregrinations." That threw me off, and then I knew I would have trouble keeping up. It'd be interesting if there was some nonintrusive way to dynamically adjust the speed. I also found it confusing when first names and surnames were separated, because I tend to recognize a person's name as a whole entity. Spritz seems to use longer pauses for commas, which seems helpful. But I really miss being able to see the whole sentence I'm "reading"...

[mercer]

For me it's more than just the sentence that I miss reading. I miss the context of the entire paragraph and, to a lesser degree, being able to see the preceding and following paragraphs.

I recently rediscovered the joy of reading longer pieces that take their sweet time to build up to a point, or to explain something complex. These texts are generally both longer and denser than, say, blog posts, and while paragraphs don't always require repeated reading, I usually find myself skipping back and forth between them to get a good mental image of the way they relate to each other.

I think tools such as this might be useful for reading relatively simple texts (blog posts, biographies, certain novels), but if anything I want to do less of that in the first place.

[sillysaurus3]

If you pause playback, the surrounding words appear. If you then hold down the right arrow key, you can speedread at your own pace.

I wish keyboard buttons were pressure-sensitive so that you could adjust how fast something is going by pressing harder. But in lieu of that, using arrow keys to scroll through the words is a pretty nice reading experience for me.