Most of us fill up on our daily quota of reading from our electronic devices these days, computers being primary among them. Whether you’re reading news, textbooks, short stories, even Wikipedia, reading can take up a lot of time of your day.
Imagine you could double your reading speed by using just an extension – the time you could save! Spreed is a Chrome extension that can help you achieve this feat. It’s not nonsense or magic; it’s technology, pure and simple. It utilizes a visual technique called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) that the fastest speed readers around the world use.
Know that inner voice of yours when you read? Better known as Subvocalization, Spreed helps you eliminate that voice. It also eliminates “too much” focus on the words themselves, which means you can read more visually that results in faster reading while maintaining comprehension. The combination of both is what helps in achieving faster reading speeds.
Get Spreed for your Browser
Go to the Chrome Web Store and search for ‘Spreed’ to get the extension. You can also click the button below to go to the extension’s listing on the Chrome Store.
Click on the ‘Add to Chrome’ button to install the extension on your browser.
A confirmation dialog box will appear stating that the extension can read and change your data on a number of websites. Click on the ‘Add extension’ button to proceed and complete the installation.
The icon for Spreed will appear on your address bar with the rest of your extensions.
How to Use Spreed
You can use Spreed in multiple ways to increase your reading speed. To speed read the entire page, click the extension icon, and select the ‘Spreed current page’ option from the menu.
Spreed will open, and you can start reading the content of the webpage from Spreed’s screen instead.
You can also use the keyboard shortcut ‘Alt + V’ to auto-extract the main content of the webpage and open it in Spreed.
To read only the selected content instead of the whole page, select the content and then open Spreed from either the extension icon menu or the keyboard hotkey shortcut ‘Alt + V’.
To read content from somewhere other than your web browser, say a PDF or a Word file, you can use this method instead. Copy the text from the PDF you wish to Spreed. Then, click the extension icon and select ‘Paste Text Into Spreed’ from the menu.
A separate tab for Spreed will open. Paste the previously copied text into the textbox and click the ‘Spreed Pasted Text’ button. You can also use the keyboard shortcut ‘Shift + Enter’ to start Spreeding the text.
The Spreed Chrome extension is free to use, but it also offers a Spreed Pro subscription. With a Pro subscription, you get additional features such as 12 new fonts, including a special font for people with Dyslexia and other popular fonts proven to increase reading speed. You also get features like Spreed in Kindle Cloud, themes, and native PDF and ePUB support on the way too.
Spreed also has a PDF reader that you can use to speed read entire PDF files. Click the extension icon, and select ‘Open PDF Reader’ from the menu. The PDF Reader is available as part of a Pro subscription only.
The PDF Reader will open in a separate tab. Click the ‘Open file’ icon on the toolbar on the upper right corner of the screen.
After opening a PDF from your computer, click the Orange-colored Spreed button on the upper left corner of the screen.
Spreed only reads the current page of the PDF. To move between pages of the PDF without having to start Spreed on all pages separately, click on the ‘Left/ Right’ arrows on the Spreed window.
Spreed can be really helpful whether you’re just looking to increase your speed generally or struggle with slow reading speed. It can also be immensely helpful for people with dyslexia.
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