Smartphones today have made reading while on the move a much better experience. You could be waiting anywhere — on the bus, in the queue, at a café or even at your dentist’s and you could whip out your iPhone and spend your time reading something. Services like Pocket, Instapaper or Readability have made it possible to save a long list of content that you’d want to read, but don’t have time to read at that very moment. Syllable is a new iPhone app that works as a companion app to help you speed read.
Syllable is designed to help you read faster than you’re generally used to. It achieves this by cutting down on the number of words displayed on the screen, showing you only one word by default.
The most common reason people read slowly is due to something called subvocalization — when reading you say the words to yourself, which limits how fast you can read to a speed similar to how fast you can talk. Syllable helps to reduce this subvocalization by pacing through the reading at a rate you define, only showing one word at a time.
Syllable has an absolutely minimal interface. Tap the screen once to start reading and tap it again to pause. As you begin, Syllable hides all its UI controls, so you only see the words you are reading. It does offer some customization like changing the font, font-size, words-per-minute, number of words displayed at a time and a switch to toggle between light and dark theme. At the bottom of the screen are two buttons to move your read position in an article either back by 50 words or forward by 50. There’s also a subtle progress bar that shows you your position in the current article as well as the approximate time remaining to read the rest of the article.
Not only does Syllable integrate with Pocket & Instapaper, it also works as a standalone app. You can add URLs (auto-detected) and blocks of text directly into the app. You can set the WPM to suit your speed and slowly increase it as you get used to it. Syllable does a lot of things right and does have a nice polish to it, I did encounter a few bugs here and there. For example, if you set it to display 3/5 words at a time and the font-size is set high, it doesn’t warp the text, so more than half the words are lost. I also wish it had a better font collection to customize from. However, Syllable is fairly new on the App Store and could easily fix these things in a few updates. It’s currently available on the App Store on sale for $0.99 and if speed reading excites you, you should definitely try Syllable out.