Speed Reading is a utility to help you read and comprehend text quickly. Type or paste any text you want to the main text window. Click the OK button to have Speed Reading read the text to you Word-by-Word (or by Line, Sentence or Paragraph), highlighting and speaking each word.
Use Speed Reading to improve:
•your reading speed by increasing the Words per Minute in the Preferences
•your reading comprehension by having the message coming to you via two senses (visual and aural)
•your productivity by freeing yourself from the screen to perform other tasks while the text is being read to you, yet seeing exactly where you are up to
•your accuracy by verifying your outgoing messages for grammatical, spelling or logical errors before they are sent
Speed Reading automatically takes any text on the clipboard, pastes it into the main window then speaks that text. It can work with text from any application including Mail, Pages, Word or Safari.
Options:
•Voice — choose a voice from any of the built-in System voices, including the downloaded premium voices
•Auto-Talk — turn on/off the automatic speaking of the clipboard.
•Remove URLs and Emails — turn on/off the automatic removal of web site addresses (they are often long and interrupt the flow)
•Combine Paragraphs — rejoin lines back into paragraphs broken by PDF files or some email packages.
•Volume — change the Speed Reading Volume, even if different from the normal volume.
•Rate — changes the Words per Minute of the speaking. Note that the speaking must be stopped (not just paused) for the new rate to take effect.
•Audio File — you can save the current text, voice and rate as an AIFF audio file.
•Wikipedia on Speed Reading — you can view the Wikipedia web page on Speed Reading from inside the application.
•Talking Web — you can use the same web page window to navigate to other web sites, highlight and speak their text.
v1.1 [Jun 28, 2012]
[New] There is now a preference to combine paragraphs, for example from truncated emails or text copied from PDF files.
[New] You can now Summarise Text down to a user-specified number of sentences.
[New] You can now choose to have the spoken text highlighted by Word, Line, Sentence or Paragraph.
[New] When the highlighted text is below the visible screen it pages down for you.
[New] There is now a preference to remove web addresses.
[New] There is now a preference to remove email addresses.
[New] There is now a preference to clean the text. This removes excess spaces and returns, plus other edits.
[New] Once speech has finished it checks to see if different text is on the Clipboard. If so, it will speak the new Clipboard text.
[New] Now saves your Preferences and font size between saves.
[New] Compatible with Retina Display.
[New] Compatible with Mountain Lion.
[Fix] No longer displays some text artefacts when reading new text from clipboard.
[Fix] No longer crashes on the last word of certain texts.
[Fix] Bringing the application to the foreground while speech is running and with new clipboard text no longer cancels the current speech.
