Sight training
A word flashes, then a mask covers it. Tap the picture it names. Try five, right here.
Ready when you are
The flash starts gentle and gets quicker as you get them right.
How fast do you read?
A free reading speed test: one short passage, five questions, about 3 minutes. See your words per minute and how much of it you actually took in. No account needed.
A short practice, measured
Read and measure
A speed test, paced reading and a skim challenge, each with questions at the end.
- Reading speed
- Share understood
- Words understood per minute
Most adults read about 238 words a minute (Brysbaert, 2019). The speed test shows where you are.
Medals worth earning
34 medals for the practice that research supports. Speed on its own never earns one.
Honest about limits
Every feature says what the evidence supports, and where it runs out. See what the research says.
A plan for today
Four short checks first. Then your minutes go to the skills holding you back, each with a target from your own numbers.
Your progress, kept Early access
Saved on this device as you practise, then to your account once your invite arrives, across all your devices. Practice works offline too.
Why we measure everything
The research on reading faster is thin, so we don’t promise you a number. We measure yours, every session.
Why don’t you promise a speed?
Because the research behind speed-reading promises is thin. So we measure you instead: your speed and how much you understood, from your first check onwards. Every change is yours to see. Does speed reading work?
What do you measure?
Your reading speed counted with what you understood, how briefly you can take in a word or a phrase, how often a word’s sound fools you, and how much you still remember days later. Every number comes from your own sessions.
What about the voice in my head?
Everyone reads with one. Sound traps shows how often a word’s sound pulls you away from its spelling, and trains you to catch it. More on subvocalization.
Start with your reading speed.
Start with a free reading check, about 3 minutes, no account. Then three short drills complete your four checks and shape your plan.
Have an account? Log in
Early access
Get in early.
Gulp opens to readers in small groups. Leave your email and your invite comes as soon as there’s a place for you.
- Your invite before the public launch
- Founding reader perks, saved for the first on the list
- Your speed test waits on this device and joins your account
An intro film: the camera glides through a field of dots like stars, and the letters R, E, A and D grow out of it one at a time; a sentence plays one word at a time, getting faster; six letters on a turning spiral spell Glance and settle into the name Gulp; then Pip the owl flies in from far away over a floor of dots, lands close, leans in to look at you, and hops up beside the last card.
Gulp
Every page starts with a glance.
Hi! I’m Pip. Let’s see how fast you read.
How fast do you read?
One short passage, then five questions. About 3 minutes, no account needed.
Adults read non-fiction at about words a minute (Brysbaert, 2019).
Create your account
Your progress is saved to your account and follows you to any device.
Welcome back
Log in to pick up where you left off, on this device or any other.
What should Nibs call you?
Choose a name for your reading journey. You can change it in Settings any time.
Today
0 of 10 min today
Change goal
Your starting point
Take the tour
Nibs says:
Today’s plan
Let’s find your starting point.
Four short checks, under 10 minutes. Every number after today is measured against them.
Stop between checks whenever you like. Today keeps your place.
Tips
Why it matters
Warm up
Three tries
Ready when you are
Review your answers
Want in early?
Gulp opens to readers in small groups. Your result waits on this device, and your invite brings it into your account.
Your starting point is set.
Your four checks
This is your plan.
Tomorrow
Free to start
No card needed. Already have an account? Log in
Sight training
Practise recognising words, checking spelling and taking meaning from short phrases.
Back to Train
New ways to practise
Practice lab
Recall, learn words and connect ideas. Explore five playable prototypes.
Recall Quest
Start with what sticks.
- Read
- Recall
- Return
Find your next practice
Practice lab
How it works
Measures
Good to know
Sight Drill in Progress
1 / 30 trials
Flash 300 ms
Paused
The app went into the background, so the last trial didn’t count. Look at the centre and carry on when you’re ready.
Session done
Medals you moved
All medalsWords to look at again
What these numbers mean
A little discovery.
Explore the reading trail, or get lost in a good book.
Speed test
Ready when you are.
Paced reading
Read to the end already?
Then it joins your collection and opens the next one.
Skim challenge
0:00How to skim
- Read the first sentence of each paragraph. That’s where the main point usually sits.
- Let your eyes run down the rest for names, numbers and key terms.
- Move on when a paragraph stops paying off. Good skimmers leave early.
You have 30 s, . When time runs out the text is covered and the questions begin.
Time’s up
How many questions do you expect to get right?
Go with your gut. Comparing guesses with real scores shows how well you can tell when you’ve understood.
What do you remember?
Answer from memory. If you don’t know, choose Not sure rather than guess: lucky guesses make your score look better than your reading was.
Let the story stay with you
Continue readingRecall what you read
Try these before looking back. These are reflection prompts, with no score.
- What happened, or what was the main idea, in this section?
- Which detail supports your summary?
- What changed, and what do you expect next?
Look back at the part you read
Save a word for later
Find saved words and reflections in Books → Your reading notebook.
Medals you moved
All medalsBy question type
Come back tomorrow: a three-question recall check shows how much of this stays with you.
Your answers
Recall check
Medals you moved
All medalsThen and now
Progress
How far you’ve come, how each skill is doing, and what to work on next.
Nothing to show yet. Do the four starting checks on Today and your progress starts here.
Where you are now
What’s improving
More details
Everything behind your numbers, by topic. Tap one to look closer.
Your reading profile
See today’s planSkill map
How to read it
Each skill is on its own scale, from your recent sessions. The two marks on a bar show where a skill stops needing work and where it becomes a strength. Today’s plan spends its minutes on the skills marked as today’s focus.
Insights
Insights appear after a few more sessions: they need enough readings to tell a pattern from chance.
Your numbers
Sight drills
Reading
Words read and words understood per minute (speed × understanding)
No quizzed readings in this period.
Speed against understanding
Each quizzed reading. Up and to the right is the goal; below the line, meaning is leaking.
No quizzed readings in this period.
Understanding by question type
Answer a passage quiz to see which kinds of question you get right.
All sessions
Drills
No drills in this period.
| Date | Drill | Result | Accuracy | Setting |
|---|
Readings
No readings in this period.
| Date | Text | Mode | Speed | Understood | Understood per minute |
|---|
Activity, last 12 weeks
Personal bests
Saved on this device and in your account. Back up or delete your data in Settings.
Your medals
Earned by practising the way the research says works. Speed on its own never earns one.
New Since you last looked
0
Why medals, and their limitsAlmost there
Collections
Your month
Change rhythm
Your month plan starts once your starting point is set. Take the tour to find it, then your first month begins that day.
Your month
Skill targets
5% faster flashes and 5 points less sound pull than your usual when the month began. Your usual is the middle of your last five sessions at the same level; a target counts as reached only once three sessions back it, so one lucky session can’t reach it.
Day by day
On top, your usual in words understood per minute against what the plan expected. Below, the minutes you practised each day.
Your rhythm
Settings
Changes apply straight away, on this device and in your account.
Policies and support
What the research says
Where each idea in the app comes from. Most of these studies are small lab experiments, so the evidence that counts is yours: every session is measured.
How reading works
What sets your speed, and why understanding is the score.
What limits reading speed
Adults read non-fiction at about 238 words per minute. The limit isn’t the eyes but how fast the brain recognises words and builds them into meaning. The score that counts is words understood per minute: your reading speed times the share you understood.
Evidence and limits
The 238 figure comes from a meta-analysis of 190 studies (Brysbaert, 2019). A major review concludes that no technique lets people read several times faster with full understanding (Rayner et al., 2016).
The voice in your head is part of normal skilled reading. It holds words in memory while a sentence comes together, and suppressing it hurts understanding of hard text (Hardyck & Petrinovich, 1970; Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980; Daneman & Newson, 1992). The app does not try to silence it. Sight-game scores describe matching performance; passage checks measure reading separately.
Understanding and self-judgement
Three kinds of question test different levels of understanding, and predicting your score first shows how well you judge your own reading.
Evidence and limits
- Three kinds of question: main idea, detail and inference test different levels of understanding (Kintsch, 1988).
- “Not sure” keeps lucky guesses from making fast reading look better than it was.
- Predicting your score: readers are poor judges of their own understanding (Glenberg & Epstein, 1985; Dunlosky & Lipko, 2007). That’s what makes speed reading feel like it works; seeing the gap is how the judgement improves.
- Your own texts get cloze questions, a quick but rougher measure (Gellert & Elbro, 2013).
- Passage levels come from a readability grade (Kincaid et al., 1975).
The Train drills
What each drill measures, and what it can’t promise.
Sight recognition: Word → Picture
Word recognition is part of reading. This game measures matching a briefly shown word to a picture; its particular training benefits have not been established.
Evidence and limits
- Masked flashes make the exposure the real viewing time, the standard method in word-recognition research (Forster & Davis, 1984).
- A picture answer means nothing ever has to be said.
- Adaptive timing (a 2-down/1-up staircase) keeps you at about 71% correct, hard but not hopeless (Levitt, 1971). The threshold is taken from where it settles.
- Measured screen timing: no flash is shorter than two frames, and trials interrupted by leaving the app are thrown away.
- Look-alike pictures stop guessing from the first letter, and longer words at higher levels take longer to take in (New et al., 2006).
- “La-la” mode keeps the inner voice busy, the standard lab method (Baddeley et al., 1984).
- Missed words come back on a spaced schedule (Leitner boxes) until they’re learned.
Limit: faster single words are necessary for faster reading, not sufficient. The Read tab checks whether it transfers.
Sound versus spelling: Sound traps
Readers can wrongly accept bare as an animal because it sounds like bear (Van Orden, 1987). This demonstrates an influence of sound on word recognition. It does not establish a benefit from training the effect away.
Evidence and limits
The pull is strongest with brief, masked flashes and weakens as spelling takes over (Coltheart et al., 1994).
Each trap has a control that looks about as similar but sounds different (beer). Sound pull is how much more often traps fool you than controls. The comparison helps separate types of error, but does not remove every source of noise or measure inner speech.
Sessions now balance real members, sound-alike traps and spelling controls before shuffling their order. Short sessions still give uncertain estimates. Fewer errors here do not establish better passage reading.
Phrase span: Phrase glance
The gist of a short phrase can be taken from one brief look (Asano & Yokosawa, 2011). The drill flashes phrases of two, three or five words and asks which picture they describe.
Evidence and limits
Snell & Grainger (2017) reported better word identification in grammatical sequences. A later study challenged the interpretation and attributed the advantage to guessing (Staub et al., 2025); the mechanism remains debated.
The phrases are about everyday things, their colour, how many and where. Each wrong picture differs from the right one by a single word, so no word can be skipped.
Limit: a lower threshold is progress on this matching task. It does not prove simultaneous recognition, a wider reading span or improved passage comprehension.
Reading and remembering
The ways to read, and keeping what you read.
Paced reading
A pacer stops drifting and habitual re-reading. Your training pace adapts so it never runs far ahead of your understanding.
Evidence and limits
- A pacer helps focus, but understanding falls when the pace runs far ahead of it (Rayner et al., 2016).
- Your training pace adapts: it starts a little above your speed test, then each quizzed paced reading moves it up 5% (80%+ understood), down 10% (under 60%) or holds.
- Back goes to the start of the sentence. Looking back is how readers repair misunderstandings (Schotter et al., 2014).
- Phrase chunks follow visual-syntactic formatting (Walker et al., 2005). Evidence is limited to modest classroom effects (Tate et al., 2019), so it’s a comfort option, not a promise.
- One-spot display marks the letter where a word is recognised fastest (O’Regan & Jacobs, 1992). It removes eye movements, but they were never the bottleneck.
Skimming
Skimming is its own skill with a known trade-off: moderate understanding, when deep understanding isn’t the goal (Rayner et al., 2016).
Evidence and limits
Good skimmers read until a paragraph stops paying off, then move on, and keep more of what matters than readers going line by line at the same speed (Duggan & Payne, 2009). The challenge scores main ideas apart from details, and keeps skims out of your reading-speed numbers.
Keeping what you read
Recalling a text beats re-reading it, so a day and a week after a passage, three of its questions come back. The share still right is your retention.
Evidence and limits
Recalling beats re-reading for keeping a text a week later (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006), and spaced recalls help more (Cepeda et al., 2006). Retention is a better long-term measure than words per minute.
Short daily sessions beat long rare ones (Cepeda et al., 2006), and a small routine at the same time each day is what makes a habit (Lally et al., 2010). That’s why Today offers a fixed plan and Settings a daily calendar reminder.
How the app is built
The page you read on, your month, the medals and the lab.
The reading page
Text size and line length affect comfort and speed on screen (Dyson, 2004), and extra letter spacing helps some readers with dyslexia (Zorzi et al., 2012). Settings lets you shape the page you read on.
The month plan, its target and its forecast
Each month gets a plan: minutes a day, days a week, and a target in words understood per minute for its last day, with a checkpoint each week. Once your own readings show a trend, the target is where keeping your rhythm is expected to take you; before then, it’s a first step of 5%. The three skills the drills train each get a target too: 5% faster flashes, and 5 points less sound pull.
Evidence and limits
- One target you can reach. A specific goal that is hard but reachable leads to more effort than doing your best (Locke & Latham, 2002), and near goals keep people going where a distant one alone doesn’t (Bandura & Schunk, 1981). So the month has one number for its last day and a checkpoint each Sunday on the way.
- How the target is set. From your trend, it’s the middle of the forecast for keeping your rhythm: a goal you’d reach about as often as not. The top of the range is the stretch. Without a trend, or with one too flat to expect a gain, it’s a first step: 5% above your usual, the smallest change the app counts as real. That step is a goal, not a forecast. The target is set when your rhythm starts and holds still all month; a new rhythm sets a new one.
- Skill targets. Word recognition, phrase matching and sound-spelling discrimination describe performance on the three tasks. Their month targets are 5% faster flashes and 5 points less sound pull. These are practice goals, not validated predictions of cognitive improvement. Your usual is the middle of your last five sessions at the same level; three sessions must support reaching a target. Passage reading is measured separately.
- A curve, not a straight line. Skills improve quickly at first and then more slowly with practice (Newell & Rosenbloom, 1981; Heathcote et al., 2000). The forecast follows your minutes along such a curve, so twice the minutes forecasts more, but not twice as much.
- Fitted to you. It appears after six quizzed readings over ten days, uses a robust slope (Theil-Sen) so one odd reading barely tilts it, and never forecasts that practice makes you slower.
- Checked before it was shown. On thousands of simulated readers whose skill follows a different curve, with noisy quizzes and months lighter or busier than the last, about three months in four landed inside the range. Each month’s review says where yours landed.
- Fresh starts. A new month is a moment people find it easier to begin again from (Dai et al., 2014), and changing your rhythm starts the plan afresh from that day.
- Seeing progress helps. Watching how you’re doing against a goal helps people reach it (Harkin et al., 2016), so the chart shows your minutes and your usual against the plan.
- Kind words on purpose. Self-compassion after a setback makes people more willing to improve (Breines & Chen, 2012), and missing a day didn’t stop habits forming (Lally et al., 2010). Skills also grow in steps, with flat stretches between (Gray & Lindstedt, 2017), so a flat week is shown next to what your minutes predict.
Limit: a target and a forecast, not a promise. It assumes the coming weeks practise like the past ones; a new kind of practice, a hard month or harder passages can move you outside the range, and the range covers the chance in readings, not every change in life.
Medals and Nibs
Medals reward the practice the sections above support: coming back daily, recall checks, understanding, judging your own score. None is for speed alone, and the speed medal counts words understood per minute, your usual.
Evidence and limits
- Seeing the next medal close helps: effort speeds up as a goal gets nearer (Kivetz et al., 2006), so each medal shows how far you have to go.
- Feedback, not payment. Rewards that feel controlling can crowd out the enjoyment of a task; feedback about getting better tends not to (Deci et al., 1999). Each medal says what you did and why it matters.
- Nibs is kind about a broken streak. A broken streak makes people less likely to start again (Silverman & Barasch, 2023), so Nibs says it kept your place and points at the smallest next step, never a telling-off.
Limit: game elements help on average, but how much depends on the person and the task (Hamari et al., 2014). The medals are a nudge; words understood per minute is the measure.
The practice lab
The lab adapts studied learning methods into playable prototypes. Evidence for a method does not validate a particular game. Reflections are self-checks; authored questions and exact word retrieval have separate scores.
Lab sessions use their own teaching material and notebook. They do not set your reading pace, skill profile, medals or daily-plan progress. A proper evaluation would compare practice groups using unseen passages, separate speed and comprehension measures, and delayed recall.
Explore the practice labLeft out, and the sources
What the app won’t do, and every study it cites.
Left out on purpose
Some popular techniques are missing because the evidence doesn’t back them.
What and why
- Eliminating subvocalisation. It supports understanding and returns on hard text (Hardyck & Petrinovich, 1970).
- 1,000+ wpm. Such claims don’t survive comprehension checks. Results over 1,200 wpm are labelled as skimming.
- Peripheral-vision and eye exercises. The eyes aren’t the bottleneck (McConkie & Rayner, 1975; Rayner, 1998).
- Bionic Reading. An online test by Readwise with over 2,000 readers found no speed benefit (2022, not peer reviewed).
- Dyslexia fonts. No improvement in reading rate or accuracy in controlled tests (Wery & Diliberto, 2017); letter spacing is offered instead.
Sources
Peer-reviewed studies and reviews behind every claim above. The full write-up, with how each number in the app is worked out, is in docs/research.md.
All 39 references
- Asano, M., & Yokosawa, K. (2011). Rapid extraction of gist from visual text and its influence on word recognition. The Journal of General Psychology, 138(2), 127-154.
- Baddeley, A. D., Lewis, V., & Vallar, G. (1984). Exploring the articulatory loop. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 36(2), 233-252.
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
- Cepeda, N. J., Pashler, H., Vul, E., Wixted, J. T., & Rohrer, D. (2006). Distributed practice in verbal recall tasks: A review and quantitative synthesis. Psychological Bulletin, 132(3), 354-380.
- Coltheart, V., Patterson, K., & Leahy, J. (1994). When a ROWS is a ROSE: Phonological effects in written word comprehension. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 47(4), 917-955.
- Daneman, M., & Newson, M. (1992). Assessing the importance of subvocalization during normal silent reading. Reading and Writing, 4, 55-77.
- Duggan, G. B., & Payne, S. J. (2009). Text skimming: The process and effectiveness of foraging through text under time pressure. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(3), 228-242.
- Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668.
- Dunlosky, J., & Lipko, A. R. (2007). Metacomprehension: A brief history and how to improve its accuracy. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(4), 228-232.
- Dyson, M. C. (2004). How physical text layout affects reading from screen. Behaviour & Information Technology, 23(6), 377-393.
- Ehri, L. C. (2005). Learning to read words: Theory, findings, and issues. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9(2), 167-188.
- Forster, K. I., & Davis, C. (1984). Repetition priming and frequency attenuation in lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 10(4), 680-698.
- Gellert, A. S., & Elbro, C. (2013). Cloze tests may be quick, but are they dirty? Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment, 31(1), 16-28.
- Glenberg, A. M., & Epstein, W. (1985). Calibration of comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11(4), 702-718.
- Hamari, J., Koivisto, J., & Sarsa, H. (2014). Does gamification work? A literature review of empirical studies on gamification. In Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (pp. 3025-3034). IEEE.
- Hardyck, C. D., & Petrinovich, L. F. (1970). Subvocal speech and comprehension level as a function of the difficulty level of reading material. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9, 647-652.
- Hardyck, C. D., Petrinovich, L. F., & Ellsworth, D. W. (1966). Feedback of speech muscle activity during silent reading: Rapid extinction. Science, 154, 1467-1468.
- Kincaid, J. P., Fishburne, R. P., Rogers, R. L., & Chissom, B. S. (1975). Derivation of new readability formulas for Navy enlisted personnel (Research Branch Report 8-75).
- Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95(2), 163-182.
- Kivetz, R., Urminsky, O., & Zheng, Y. (2006). The goal-gradient hypothesis resurrected: Purchase acceleration, illusionary goal progress, and customer retention. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(1), 39-58.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.
- Leitner, S. (1972). So lernt man lernen. Herder.
- Levitt, H. (1971). Transformed up-down methods in psychoacoustics. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 49, 467-477.
- McConkie, G. W., & Rayner, K. (1975). The span of the effective stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception & Psychophysics, 17(6), 578-586.
- New, B., Ferrand, L., Pallier, C., & Brysbaert, M. (2006). Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13(1), 45-52.
- O’Regan, J. K., & Jacobs, A. M. (1992). Optimal viewing position effect in word recognition: A challenge to current theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 18(1), 185-197.
- Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 372-422.
- Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4-34.
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249-255.
- Schotter, E. R., Tran, R., & Rayner, K. (2014). Don’t believe what you read (only once): Comprehension is supported by regressions during reading. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1218-1226.
- Share, D. L. (1995). Phonological recoding and self-teaching: Sine qua non of reading acquisition. Cognition, 55(2), 151-218.
- Silverman, J., & Barasch, A. (2023). On or off track: How (broken) streaks affect consumer decisions. Journal of Consumer Research, 49(6), 1095-1117.
- Slowiaczek, M. L., & Clifton, C. (1980). Subvocalization and reading for meaning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 573-582.
- Snell, J., & Grainger, J. (2017). The sentence superiority effect revisited. Cognition, 168, 217-221.
- Tate, T. P., Collins, P., Xu, Y., Yau, J. C., Krishnan, J., Prado, Y., Farkas, G., & Warschauer, M. (2019). Visual-syntactic text format: Improving adolescent literacy. Scientific Studies of Reading, 23(4), 287-304.
- Van Orden, G. C. (1987). A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound, and reading. Memory & Cognition, 15(3), 181-198.
- Walker, S., Schloss, P., Fletcher, C. R., Vogel, C. A., & Walker, R. C. (2005). Visual-syntactic text formatting: A new method to enhance online reading. Reading Online, 8(6).
- Wery, J. J., & Diliberto, J. A. (2017). The effect of a specialized dyslexia font, OpenDyslexic, on reading rate and accuracy. Annals of Dyslexia, 67(2), 114-127.
- Zorzi, M., Barbiero, C., Facoetti, A., Lonciari, I., Carrozzi, M., Montico, M., Bravar, L., George, F., Pech-Georgel, C., & Ziegler, J. C. (2012). Extra-large letter spacing improves reading in dyslexia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(28), 11455-11459.