SwiftRead - read faster, learn more

We all know you want/need money. First you blocked features and make them pro. Acceptable. Now you limit the use to force users into your business model. Too much. Thanks for the good old days, it was really useful.

The new update completely changed this extension, so consider all reviews before today to be completely irrelevant. What used to be so quick as to be effectively instantaneous is now a sluggish mess that lacks several of the most important options and features of the previous version, except now they also charge you by how much you read. The option to switch to the legacy version is fake - activating it simply opens up a dialogue that tells you you need to switch to the current enshittified slop version.

This has been an absolute mess. I paid for SwiftRead Pro 4 days ago and never received the license, meaning I can’t even use the Pro Version. I tried to get a refund almost immediately and have emailed repeatedly for 4 days now. Not a single response. No license, no support, no refund - just silence. And after buying, I discovered the “Pro” version is basically the same as the regular version, only a browser extension, with no real use for iPads or eReaders. The kicker: their refund process requires a license…that they don’t send. But they’re happy to keep sending marketing emails asking for beta testers. Completely unacceptable. Stay away.

TL;DR: Product has promise, abysmal support, paid version doesn't work as advertised. This really is one of those products that has promise, but the support is horrid. Other than that, there are parts of the products that are not ready but is being charged for pro. I paid for the pro subscription and when asked for a time horizon on firefox extension... nothing, except a generic email from the developer, Troy. Moreover, I tried this extension on the Orion browser and much to my dismay, it did not work as advertised for a paid product. Citing these reasons I requested a refund (I was not in the 14 day window as I had paid for a full year; need to read a lot for work) and did not get anything back except a generic email. For example, I am still waiting on hearing back on: Hello Troy, I am not in the 14 day window for a refund. I'd like to know if you can refund the amount as a special case. Where SwiftRead missed my expectation: - no firefox extension, when emailed, no reply except for a generic "We have received your email...." - Errors like this: "SwiftRead web sign-in is temporarily disabled We're still preparing the public web experience. Please check back soon." shows that this product that you have charged me 60 dollars for is not really well supported / not ready Therefore, I'd like to request a refund.

I wanted this to work, but not being able to use it leads me to believe we need to buy the pro version. Too bad, it is a bit misleading to think we can use it right after installing. it wanted me to buy the pro version before I could hear it reading a web page.

Its a scam, there is no free voice, this guy is a criminal

its not free

The tool is great. Unfortunetly, I have purchased a "Pro" license and to unlock it requires a "license key". The License Key I have on file does not work, and SwiftRead has yet to reply to numerous emails asking for a new one. I now have a $60 Pro license that does not work. This is kind of silly.

Literally 95% of the options are locked away. That includes basic settings like being able to use certain shortcuts to increase/decrease the WPM, pausing, and micro-pausing that allow you to be able to quickly pause when a long word appears or new paragraph starts. If you don't believe me, go to the settings and see how options, very basic options, have a "Pro" box that you have to pay $15 monthly to use and prepare to be amazed.

Everything is blocked, unless we became pro.

useless

In my opinion, the sole purpose is to have a window of time that is given to the customer to try the product before spending any money on the product. The main functions require you to purchase Pro. I can read about everything your product does, from your own words and through customer anecdotes, but I would like a free trial because there are very unique things that stick with me and turn into discipline and I have been trying to find something new as my prior ways have just run their course. Maybe I need to be a tester and improve this product? Reach back out when you get a minute. - Dan Keidel Amazon People Experience and Technology (PxT), Sr. Program Manager

Very janky, it simply skips some words, not fluid at all.

I cannot get the sound to work on my computer. I have tried going through all the settings and nothing worked. This extention would be really helpful if it worked.

Nothing works unless you pay for PRO, so it's basically useless

It doesn't work Microsoft Edge and window PC win 7, plz fix it, I will rewrite the cmt

just kinda sucked

instead of being money-friendly, you guys should be customer-friendly and give at least 1 pdf read in a month for free users. you need to give a chance to test extension on PDF files for people.

I used to love this but its got a huge bug right now, HELP! It pops open the Spreed window but the controls disappear in a split second and I cannot change say the speed or the number of words that appear at once!

It doesn't display within the current window, but is a pop-up. I prefer Reedy extension as it stays within the current window and has transparency features so you can still see the page for context e.g. images, etc.

The experience of reading using this technique is awful. The statement that the comprehension is not sacrificed is false.

I does not even read a full page"chapter" on Watt pad it only reads 2-3 pages before it stops. Please fix Spreed.

This is a terrible idea for a reading thing. Reading fast isn't important if you aren't comprehending what's going on. Reading is my favorite activity, but if the words are going by at 150 miles an hour, I won't be able to do anything! Reading requires going back and rereading what you've seen, reading it slowly, and stopping and thinking about what you've read. This extension stops that, and makes it so you can just barely look at the letters before you have to look at another. If you do not enjoy reading, I do not recommend this, it'll probably just make you hate it more.

slows me down. I want to speed read. Requires reading in phrases, lines and paragraphs at a time. This app takes a page and puts it on the screen ONE WORD AT A TIME???? Slows me down from 2000 words per minute goal to 112. No Thank you.

It creates a pop-up on every website in the bottom right corner of the screen. The pop up can't be removed. Very very annoying and as a result I have to remove the extension. I hate it because otherwise Spreed is great.

buggy

Made most sites impossible to deal with

it has malware (superfish) in it, dont install it

Whatever this new shortcut involving shift is, remove it. It breaks the extension, speed-reading text around every single password field. Terrible. Used to be amazing.

Non functional - pressing alt+v does nothing

Adds headers to every page that you visit. Google analytics and mixpanel. Basically hijacking your browsing session. Unsafe, no idea what else it could be doing.

Quite useless for me, as I read individual specific phrases at a time.

new update is terrible. Longer loading times. Features like custom text color and background color don't work. New UI makes text more difficult to read. Options less assessable, they are now nested in menues rather than on the main screen. I recommended the old version to friends. I will not recommend this one and am looking for alternatives.

edit: they added more paywalls and they deleted most of my favorite features by shrinking the settings to like half of what it was. unless there's a way to access the legacy extension again, im out. (dear reader, there are other extensions on the chrome web store that do the exact same thing without aggressive paywalls and with even more features; just search up something like "speed reader" and choose one.) old review for previous version: get this asap. the pro version looks awesome but just the free version is still perfect for a broke uni student short on time lmao. beautiful UI, so many useful features (use the "swift read this text" feature to open a windowed version and you get estimated reading time, design options, speed selection, etc). reading awful history textbooks and this has saved me so, so much time. also got to read the transcript of a lecture in 13 minutes instead of sitting through the 50 minute video. tysm <3

Ableist extention. The dyslexic font and text-to-speech are paid features. Why should one pay more for the fact they happened to be disabled?

As for now, it is impossible to test reading texts in German, since the long words pause feature is set on a too short pause in the free version. Swift reading German and agglutinative languages creating very long words with derivational morphemes is impossible with the test version. Test it e.g. on "Anschauungserfahrungen" !

I can't speak for people with reading disorders, fortunately I don't have any. The app can actually go faster. (although arrow keys would have been the logical function here) I can't say the same for myself with this app. On the contrary, I have to re-scroll the words I'm trying to read faster, otherwise the passages don't make sense. And that's how reading actually works. We see the words, but we have to understand them in the context of a sentence. This is done visually, as our eyes move back and forth, taking in the information to complete the meaning. Reading is not a sequential experience per sé. It can happen within a sentence, a paragraph, or even a page. Word separation doesn't adhere to it, and the high-contrast images only "blind" me after a few minutes.

Free version seems like false advertising im ok with paying for extra added stuff here it seems overkill either make more options available, pay only for full thing, or effin remove from google store the FREE ADDS theres so many better alternative ones i found and used already now to test I may seem harsh with only 2 stars but when theres apps that provide same or better quality free or less paywalling i have to do it.

You cannot try the read aloud function (the whole purpose of the extension) without upgrading and purchasing it. That is very frustrating and not clear when you download it. I was very confused at first and thought I did something wrong. It seems like it would be a great extension but I don't feel comfortable paying for it without even trying the function myself for a short period of time (e.g. a day). If a short free trial was available I would be happy to pay for the extension as it seems very useful.

Features that were once free are now paywalled behind the ~40$/year subscription. Even basic stuff like keyboard shortcuts.

keeps slowing down drastically after 10 words. Need to keep clicking for it to stay at full speed.

It doesn't show images when speed reading. That is in fact a huge minus when reading instructional books and articles.

it was awesome but lately it crashes when i try to paste text into it

Sadly useless for Kindle Cloud Reader. It used to work but alas, no longer. A waste of $ for that purpose.

This is an amazing extension that many people such as myself need in order to get work done on time, but with the paywalls blocking google docs and pdf scanning, it's too expensive to get the 5 star rating it would have gotten otherwise. $29 is very expensive for a college student, I would pay $5, but the creator Troy Shu (cool dude) may do better if they were to set up a Patreon or Ko-Fi instead to earn income for their awesome extension. Alternatively I would love it if things such as the fonts, colors, etc could be blocked under the pro license, but things that are essential such as pdf and google docs usage could remain free. This is an amazing extension either way

Spreed does not work on my social studies textbook online where it only reads the heading but not the content.

It forces you to accept that they can change your google docs files. Not gonna accept these new permissions. (Can't use it now anymore AT ALL since I won't allow them to change my google docs)

I had high expectations, however the reader does not work with Google's in-browser PDF viewer, Adobe PDF viewer Chrome extension o DocHub. Result = I can't read any PDFs with it. Also the PDF reader option of the Spreeder extension is for the Pro version only. So the free version is unusable, except for newspaper websites.

Doesn't read pdfs. The wording of the overview is misleading. The application can't read .pdfs -- there's no drag-n-drop. Instead there's an option to copy-paste text from a .pdf, with all the time wasted and formatting-errors this involves.

Includes Facebook iframe (for like and share) and Google Analytics code, which CANNOT be blocked by uBlock/privacy tools, because it is an extension. Please add a setting to disable this. Extension itself is great (5⭐). Privacy leaks are not fine (-5⭐).