I'm the blind dev who refactored a huge chunk of the Rust compiler [0]. I'm at roughly 800 words a minute with a synth, with the proven ability to top out at 1219. 800 or so is the norm among programmers. In order to get it we normally end up using older synths which sound way less natural because modern synthesis techniques can't go that fast. There's a trade-off between natural sounding and 500+ words a minute, and the market now strongly prefers the former because hardware can now support i.e. concatenative synthesis.

1219 is a record as far as I know. We measured it explicitly by getting the screen reader to read a passage and dividing. I spent months working up from 800 to do it and lost the skill once I stopped (there was a marked level of decreased comprehension post 1000, but I was able to program there; still, in the end, not worth it). When I try to described the required mental state it comes out very much like I'm on drugs. Most of us who reach 800 or so stay there, though not always that fast for i.e. pleasure reading (I do novels at about 400). it's built up slowly over time, either more or less explicitly. I did it because I was in high school doing muds and got tired of not being able to keep up; it took about 6-8 months of committing to turn the synth faster once a week no matter what, keeping it there and dealing with a day or two of mild headaches. Note that for most blind people these days, total synthesis time per day is around 10+ hours; this stuff replaces the pencil, the novel, etc. Others just seem to naturally do it. You have little choice, it's effectively a 1 dimensional interface, so from time to time you find a reason to bump the knob. And that's enough.

Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill.

0: https://ahicks.io/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reord...

And as a followup to that--because really this is the weird part--some circles of blind people (including mine) talk faster between ourselves. That's not common, but it happens. I still sometimes have to remember that other people can't digest technical content at the rate I say it and remember to slow down. A good way to bring it out is to have me try to explain a technical concept that I understand really well. I have the common problem in that situation of not being able to talk as fast as I think, but I also seem to have the ability to assemble words faster in a sort of tokenize/send to vocal cords sense once I know what I want to say.

To me, the fact that this does in fact seem to be bidirectional at least some is more interesting than that I can listen fast.

I kind of want to hear a "blind Danish" conversation now. For those unaware: Danish is phonetically one of the most difficult languages in the world, to the point where children who acquire Danish as their first language on average start speaking a few months later than children with any other first language. To clarify: speaking is not the same as understanding - toddlers are often capable of understanding language before they have the motor control required to speak it, which is why baby sign language exists.

Actually, understanding seems to be affected, too! See:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-child-lan...

Oh wow, did not know that! Then perhaps a better way to phrase it is that it does not imply slower general mental development of the children - at least that is what I read elsewhere.

Are you Danish? (your account name looks rather Dutch)

I always wanted to know whether it's true what I heard some years ago: a friend told me that older Danish people are complaining that the younger Danish are harder to understand because there has been a trend in recent decades to swallow consonants even more than in the past

(that's something hard to image for me as a non-Danish speaker :)

No, I'm Dutch like you guessed. While the Netherlands and Denmark are very similar in some aspects (flat countries obsessed with having the best bike infrastructure in the world) the language is quite different ;)

Living in Malmö I also find this quite hard to believe! Besides, isn't old people complaining about the younger generation butchering their language something that happens all the time in all cultures?

This is vague, because it was long ago, but I remember reading an article in a newspaper (Dagens Nyheter, Sweden, IIRC) in... Oh, the 1990s, I think.

It was about how Danish linguists were worried about how the language was getting more unintelligible. The example I remember was about the ever-increasing number of words that are pronounced, basically, “lää'e”: läkare, läge, läger, lager... Those are written in Swedish here; some Dane may translate. (In English: healer, situation, camp [laager], layer...) There were more that I don't remember; in all, I think they mentioned at least half a dozen words that had become basically indistinguishable from each other.

I don't think serious linguists have had the same fear about most other languages.

It is common for any "in-group" to speak faster than the same people in other groups. This is commonly studied in linguistic 101 courses by undergrads because it is so easy to observe - in your own groups - once you are looking for it.

But when the in-group is defined as "is blind"?? I'm not just talking about programmers in this context, or any other cross-section wherein there's some sort of shared vocabulary and context other than the disability itself. I don't think it's been studied, but I've noticed, my parents have noticed, in general enough people around me have noticed it over the years that I'm convinced the effect is real. Is whatever mechanism you're referring to typically general enough that the group can be defined this broadly and still have it happen?

That's awesome. It reminds me of the Bynars in Star Trek, who evolved ultra-fast spoken language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52_iSQnB6W0

I don’t think this is a blind person thing. Ask any nerd about something they’re into, and you stand a pretty good chance of receiving a firehouse of words representing their steam of consciousness.

Has anyone tried overlapping words instead of speeding them up? Like so:

  How
   are
    you
     doing?

I often wondered if this, or at least sped up speech, should be the default robotic interface... it would make sense to optimize for efficiency/speed (while maintaining legibility) if we can do so.

Wow, that's incredible. Do you find it frustrating talking to actual humans now? I'd imagine it feels like they're speaking in slow motion.

Edit: Hah, just saw your post on talking faster to other people who have the same audio skills.

Other people in realtime aren't...I guess the best way I have to put it is informationally sparse. There's a lot going on beside what's being said in conversation. Synths don't imply things for example; in a context with active implication slowing/pausing the synth is sometimes necessary. The skill doesn't extend beyond the blatant transfer of information. In social contexts and especially when you can't go off any visual cues whatsoever to figure out what the other person is thinking/feeling, there's a lot more going on than simple information transfer.

However most blind people I know who do this start hating audiobooks, start hating talks, and generally by far prefer the text option. audiobooks aren't annoying, but they're below my baud if you will. Net result: boredom/falling asleep to whatever it is and the need to actively make an effort to listen. Some things which require active listener participation--math lectures for example--are different. I guess the best way I can put it is that speed is inversely proportional to the amount of, I guess let's call it active listening, required.

I've given a lot of thought to this stuff, but we don't really have the right words for me to communicate it properly. A neuroscientist or linguist might, but I'm not either of those.

This is fascinating; thank you. How does an audio book read by the author, such as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, which contains autobiographical information, compare? Is it more like a social situation that you need real time to absorb, or do you prefer it at a higher speed? How does a stage play compare? Do you watch movies sped up?

Also, how does your "baud" vary with your familiarity with the ideas? I can't imagine it's independent. As a ~35 year old programmer with a decade of professional experience and a decade of hobby experience before that, I cracked open SICP for the first time and found almost everything familiar. I had digested the ideas from other sources, so I could read at a "natural" rate. If I had read it as a teenager, it would have been a mindfuck, and I would have taken multiple slow readings to understand. When you talk about numbers like 800, are you talking about writing that challenges you and changes the way you think, or are you talking about stuff you do for a living that is just information you're already primed to accommodate?

I haven't specifically tried different types of audiobooks to see if there's some preferred category.

With movies I don't bother with them unless they have descriptive audio, at which point you've got music, sound effects, and two somewhat parallel speech streams going on. That's high informational content.

I did an entire CS degree at 800 words a minute. I program in any programming language you care to name (including the initial learning) at that speed as well. For more complicated concepts I stay at that speed, but pause after every paragraph or so to chunk the content as needed. I'm doing this thread at that speed. Pretty much the only time I slow it down is pleasure reading or sometimes articles when i want to go off and do chores while I listen, but even then it's still faster than human speech.

In general i think answering these sorts of questions needs research that we don't have to my knowledge. Nothing in my personal experience or background really allows me to give you good definitive answers. The sample size to work with is pretty small and in all honesty there's not a lot of good research around blindness day-to-day in the first place.

> audiobooks aren't annoying, but they're below my baud if you will. Net result: boredom/falling asleep to whatever it is and the need to actively make an effort to listen. Some things which require active listener participation--math lectures for example--are different.

That sounds like a similar description to what it's like for people with IQs significantly higher than the average.

I can't find any recordings of 800 WPM synths. Would it be possible for you to make one? I'm curious of what it sounds like.

I don't think it'd be legal for me to hand you an espeak recording, but it works fine at 800WPM.

    espeak -s 800 "Things to say."

You can pass Espeak recordings around legally. It's just GPL. The license applies to the software, not the content produced via it.

I will attempt to remember and find the time to take my demo recording of this on Rust compiler source code that's currently in dropbox and put it up somewhere more permanent. I doubt Dropbox will care for me much if I allow HN-volume traffic to hit my account. It's Espeak using an NVDA fork with an additional voice that some of us like, so vanilla espeak is in the ballpark.

What I don't remember is if vanilla non-libsonic espeak softcaps the speech rate. It might. I believe new versions of espeak integrate libsonic directly, but that old versions just silently bump the speaking rate down if it's over the max. I haven't used command line espeak directly for anything in a very long time.

Libsonic is an optimized library specifically for the use case of screen readers that need to push synths further: https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic

Here's an online version, I bet it sounds similar as the original program: https://eeejay.github.io/espeak/emscripten/espeak.html

There is a range slider that maxes as 450, which is the maximum speed according to the manual.

I tried listening to a Wikipedia article at 450, I am so amazed you can comprehend that. Perhaps that's equivalent of me visually scanning the text instead of reading, however when I do that, I tend to focus on interesting parts for long stretches of time. With espeak, how do you focus? Can you pause it at will?

Screen readers have a lot of commands for reading different sized chunks of content. In general there's probably around 50 keystrokes I use on a daily basis. It's not as straightforward as reading from top to bottom, though it can be. I can usually do a Wikipedia article without pausing at 450 or so.

If anyone is curious, here is the NVDA keystroke reference: https://www.nvaccess.org/files/nvdaTracAttachments/455/keyco...

As an interesting sidenote, screen readers have to co-opt capslock as a modifier key, then there's fun with finding keyboards that are happy to let you hold capslock+ctrl+shift+whatever.

> Whether and how much the skill transfers to normal human speech, or even between synths, is person-specific. I can't do Youtube at much beyond 2x. Others can. It's definitely a learned skill.

I find that the maximum understandable rate varies a lot between speakers. For some speakers 2.5x is possible, but just 1.5x for others.

One advantage synths has, is that they can more easily control the speed at which words are spoken, and the pauses between words independently. When watching/listening pre-recorded content I often find that I'd want to speed up the pauses more than the words (because speeding up everything until the pauses are sufficiently short make the words intelligible).

If someone knows of a program or algorithm that can play back audio/video using different rates for speech and silence, please share.

Are old speech synths not harsh on the ears to listen for longer periods? Or maybe I'm just familiar with the super robotic ones (I like them for music production).

If so, have you considered using an EQ plugin to maybe turn down the harsher high frequencies a few notches? Just a thought.

They're harsh. But you get used to it in about a week. Espeak is an atypically bad example, which is why NVDA experimented with a fork (and maybe one day the NVDA work will make it upstream). part of what allows them to stay intelligible is the harshness. I've never tried passing one through an EQ but there are already pitch settings and similar to play with, and given that even not wearing headphones slows me down I expect that an EQ would probably be bad for it.

But more to the point there is nowhere to really plug that in to a screen reader, so we can't try it anyway. The audio subsystems of most screen readers are much less advanced than you'd think.

I've known a lot of people that push podcasts, videos, and audiobooks to extreme speed. I knew a guy who'd turn video speed up to 8x so he could binge watch a season of generic anime in an hour flat. I knew a girl who'd get through paperback romance novels by scanning each page diagonally, in 10 seconds each. And here in this thread we have a lot of people bragging along the same lines.

I just don't get the point. If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low. Any content that can be sped up that much without loss is not worth listening to in the first place. You're just skipping the trite cliches, filler, and obvious facts.

I can read fast, and I typically go through fluffy NYT bestseller nonfiction at 600 WPM. But when I do this I constantly have a sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting my time. When I read a good book full of new ideas, I barely go at 150 WPM, but the time always feels well-spent.

Exceedingly slow narration, particularly what's normal for audiobooks, is annoying to me because it's slower than I process words. It's like walking with someone whose pace is far slower than your natural gait -- it takes more energy and concentration to slow down. It's why slow-talkers are so annoying.

This isn't "how fast can I go through this" but "what is a comfortable pace"?

So I bump the speed up, though usually fairly modestly: 1.25x - 1.5x is generally enough.

I've noticed that preferred speeds vary tremendously with the quality of the work and speaker -- high-density information and an exceedingly good speaker, and I'll slow down. Slapdash redundant content and poor speaker, I'll speed up.

The degree of polish in the production matters tremendously. I've listened to CPG Grey's YouTube videos (highly polished) and podcasts (a lot of chit-chat with his co-host). The videos work well at normal speed, or perhaps slighly sped up. The podcasts I find nearly unlistenable, though they improve at much higher speeds (1.75x - 2x).

Yes, and the painful slowness becomes even more evident if you speed it up to the 1.25/1.5x range, get comfortable with it, and then go back to 1x. IME, it sounds like the speaker is going over-the-top to enunciate, like you're a small child or have learning disabilities or something.

Audiences vary, and many listeners of audiobooks are visually disabled who may also have hearing problems. Pitching the default to these seems a fair deal, particularly as speeding up is so straightforward.

I watch lectures online at 1.5-2x for a similar reason. At that speed I have to concentrate. Slower and it is easy for my mind to wander.

As a slow walker I respectfully disagree on the energy to slow down vs speed up! Concentration may be equal however. I get absolutely exhausted keeping up with you fast walkers. :)

That's interesting. If you're talking about Hello Internet, I enjoy listening to them at 1x. I find it quite relaxing to listen to passively.

To date, this is the only podcast I can actually enjoy. I generally do other things while listening, and feel like I'm in the company of friends.

It undoubtedly has a relatively low density of information however I wouldn't speed it up, I would slow it down!

I tend to listen to audio books at 2.5-2.8 times speed and all media I consum is at 2x speed.

Tip there are 10s of chrome extentios that allow you to change all html videos to 2x speed or even higher (including most ads on sites like YouTube and Hulu)

I'm totally with you, I speak at effectively 1.5x in real life, so that's what feels natural to me listening. But I get turned off if something needs to be sped up _beyond_ reasonable human speaking speed to be palatable, like 2.5x or 3x. It's like putting a pile of salt on really bland food. I get the feeling that I'm panning for gold.

I can't keep up with fast talkers and I like my books and movies at nominal speeds. When things are fast I can't pay attention. My brain needs to extra cycles to wander and consume and let my focus be split.

I think some audio books are slightly slowed down by default, many I've listened to sound more natural at about 1.2x

Part of the reason for this is that its rare for audiobook software to have a 0.9x playback option, but common to have a 1.25x option.

Yup! _+1

I used to watch a lot of lectures at a high speed. But I've came to realize that the faster I watch something, the faster I forget it.

It is like the infromation doesn't have the time to settle in my memory, despite me understanding it.

It's maybe because when things are slow, I can use the dead time to think about the implication/corner cases of what's being said.

If you really want to understand it, I would encourage you to write down notes about it by hand.

For some reason I do not yet understand, the motion of physically putting pen(cil) to paper helps ingrain that information into your brain, in a way that typing it into a computer does not.

Some people say writing is better because typing is "unnatural", but from an evolutionary standpoint both are extremely, equally unnatural activities. There's no reason moving a cylinder of graphite with one hand should be inherently better matched to the brain than moving squares of plastic with two.

My personal guess is that, with fast typing speeds, it's too easy to just copy things word for word. With writing, you have to at least rephrase it and reorganize it to fit the notes reasonably on the page, which forces some processing to occur. I take notes solely by typing, but I only have retention if I do it slowly and reflectively.

I have a pet theory that our brains are hard-wired to store information "better" if it bears some kind of personal/individual imprint.

In other words, we can "store" knowledge more efficiently when written in our own handwriting than when typed into a neutral/generic text editor.

Hmm... then perhaps it's good that I'm extremely particular about how I type my LaTeX, down to microadjustments to the kerning to make it look nicer.

There is a difference: people have been using small handheld objects to create images on flat surfaces for tens of thousands of years. Moving squares of plastic to remotely and invisibly trigger a change in the patterns of light emitted by an electronic display is somewhat different. This could explain some of the studies that have found differences in retention of typed and handwritten notes, but there are many confounding factors.

While writing is ancient, in almost all cultures the ability to write hasn't been widespread until a few centuries ago. It just isn't that useful in agriculture when books cost a fortune, and historically almost everybody was a farmer. I doubt an ability possessed by a small portion of the population over a few thousand years had a large evolutionary impact.

IMHO it's primarily because you have to process and comprehend the information in order to make a decision about what's important enough to jot down.

Although, anecdotally, I find that writing notes by hand is better for recall than typing.

I'm not sure if this is because writing activates different parts of the brain, or simply because writing is slower and forces me to therefore think harder and comprehend better because I need to be 2x as selective about what makes it into my notes.

My money's on the latter, but who knows?

I think this is likely it. In my opinion, it reminds me of autoencoders. Having to compress the information means understanding the content enough to discard unnecessary bits.

I can roughly keep up in real time with speaking on the keyboard. Even though speaking is a bit faster than my max rate around 90 wpm, by dropping filler words and gaps I can mostly avoid summarizing and quote verbatim. When transposing at full speed like that, I feel like a conduit at times, very little sticks deeply in memory.

Contrast with writing notes, where I'll only write down things I find particularly important. Most of the time I'm just trying to actively listen.

Purely anecdotally, I feel like when I am typing and summarizing to the same compression ratio as writing, my retention with typing is better, because I can do it without looking, it's faster, and I can tune back in to the speaker.

On the other other hand, with a laptop open, I'm much more likely to get distracted with emails/tasks.

Bottom line, I think we need to study more axes of this problem, if only because it gives neat insights into cognition.

Here's a paper on the topic which presents some ideas: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976145245...

Also, I was amazed at how listening twice to a history lecture really helped my retention. I'd listen while walking to my next campus class.

This varies by person. Not everyone learns by writing. Some only learn b hearing or seeing. Some can only learn by doing. Most of us are a mix. I learn just abou every way except for writing or typing. Online lectures i do best by playing at 1.2x at most and pausing regularly to let me think of implications and to crosslink to things i have already learned.

This post was far more controversial than i thought it was. I keeps gettin voted up and down. Anyone explain why?

People tend to enjoy genre fiction because it is full of predictable filler. Not all entertainment has to be surprising or life changing.

Just spending time in the moment with an enjoyable story is not wasting it.

I think this really is a case of to each his own. Pure fiction with drawn out descriptions and excess vocabulary drives me to anger.

I think I have a similar thing visually, where above a certain text size, I have a very hard time reading. The optimal text size for me is pretty small, even on a standard resolution display.

After doing speed reading exercises a few years ago I initially also started to use the techniques for novels, but that was a bad mistake in my opinion.

While I could get my comprehension percentage quite high with a bit of training, I lost all connection to the characters and story, stopped imagining the scenes and felt like the reading the book was a waste of time.

Novels should be read at a natural pace to give room to your imagination and dive into the story. You can still quickly scan over boring/repetitive filler text, but I did that without caring about WPM already.

With other things like textbooks / articles / reports cranking up your WPM and applying your attention more selectively by focusing on or re-reading critical parts is a very helpful skill though.

Maybe "speed readers" still receive knowledge at around 39bps - they just filter out a lot more.

I think there's something to that. You're zipping through just listening for the highlights. Similar to how you can listen to a full podcast, or often just watch highlight clips on Youtube and feel like you "mostly" enjoyed it. You got the best stuff. Obviously that isn't what some people want, but it's an interesting optimization.

> . If you can process content much faster than it was meant to be played, it doesn't mean you're learning much faster than you could, it means the novel information density is low.

I 'read' your comment using TTS at 3x. What does that say about the information density of your comment?

(Little to nothing. TTS at that speed is still marginally slower that I normally read with my eyes. Human speech is generally much slower than is necessary to be understood.)

That's a good point, 3x speaking speed is reading speed, so there's nothing unusual about using it on comments largely intended to be read. That makes perfect sense.

What doesn't make sense to me is consuming things that have a _set_ speed, such as video/TV or lectures, at a dramatically faster speed.

I imagine it's a compromise between cutting through the fluff and using the primary source material.

You could just read the plot synopsis or watch the highlights, but sometimes those don't convey build-up, suspense, or other data that are hard to losslessly compress.

Being comfortable with the "boilerplate" of a given medium or genre usually lets you skim or skip it to jump right into the good stuff.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks while doing other things; walking, cleaning, cooking, traveling, playing games, etc. Every time I try speeding up, even just to 1.25x, I don't enjoy it as much, as it feels rushed and stressful. I think it could be interesting to learn to listen and read at extremely high speeds, but nothing more than interesting, and I'm even doubting the usefulness of it.

heh, when I slow audiobooks down to 1x it sounds like the reader is drunk. I usually go with 1.5-2x depending on the reader.

On the flip side, I listen to podcasts at 2x and now the hosts' voices sound weird when I hear them at 1x elsewhere.

Same here. I go anywhere from 2.1 to 2.5 based on the podcast.

Mummy, why is everyone in real life drunk?

As I used to tell my boss: a man page read once thoroughly is worth more than ten-times skimming it quickly.

Any content that can be sped up [by 8x] without loss is not worth listening to in the first place.

"That's just, like, your opinion, man."

Obviously the people who are getting something out of it, otherwise they wouldn't do it?

"Don't yuck my yum."

> I can read fast, and I typically go through fluffy NYT bestseller nonfiction at 600 WPM. But when I do this I constantly have a sneaking suspicion that I'm just wasting my time. When I read a good book full of new ideas, I barely go at 150 WPM, but the time always feels well-spent.

I do the same, but with Hacker News comments :)

Hey, I never said my comment was a novel insight! I'm here to waste time too. ;-)

In my experience the best books routinely stop me dead in my tracks. I just started Invisible Man and every paragraph is littered with really deep themes, I can normally finish a 500 page book in a few days (a majority of my reading is done during my commute) but this will definitely be a slow burn.

I think it depends on the speaker. I watch most videos at 1.5x speed, and some slow speakers with gaps at 2x.

Fluff has value. Fresh cotton candy should be eaten rapidly. It’s fluff. It’s allowed :)

For me, when I'm reading something dense, my WPM fluctuates. It could be 300WPM in the easy areas, and down to 30WPM in the conceptually challenging areas.

I can watch videos like Linus Tech Tips up to 2x speed and get just as much out of it as otherwise.

Here’s a blind programmer using Visual Studio with a ridiculously fast TTS: https://youtu.be/94swlF55tVc

I'm not blind, but I've tested some of my apps for VoiceOver and it's just utterly unusable with a "reasonable" speed. You have to pretty much set it to your reading speed for it to be useful, and that happens to be significantly faster than most people are comfortable speaking.

Start slow, and build up your tolerance to it overtime. If you try to jump into the deep end, you'll just make yourself disappointed.

I'm reasonably good at listening to sped-up audio, personally, so this wasn't really an issue for me. I was just providing anecdotal reasoning of why TTS users may set their audio speed to something that might sound unreasonable: it takes forever to navigate the interface otherwise.

This makes me emotional.

Same. It really makes you realize what we take for granted as sighted developers. I can't imagine what the learning curve was like for him, as he lost his sight at age 7, long before many of these accessibility technologies existed. [1]

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/saqib-shaikh-on-tec...

Yes, it was like this video (scroll ahead to 1 minute mark).

Thank you for sharing that, was super interesting.

Yes. Took me a while but I can comfortably understand 2x speed and now 1x podcasts seem weird like they're talking super slow. I would imagine it's something you just train even more out of necessity.

I typically use TTS near 2.5x (I turn it up when I'm alert and down when I'm tired.) It's definitely a learned skill; a few years ago I started at 1x and struggled even with that.

Every couple of months, take a moment to reflect on your comprehension. Is it currently easy for you to understand the audio? If yes, then crank it up a little bit until it's noticeably more difficult. Repeat this process periodically over a year or so and before you know it, it'll be set pretty damn quick.

I can watch YouTube content at 3x without issue. I did this without much intentional effort - I simply downloaded an extension which allows me to speed up the video in increments of 0.1x using a keyboard shortcut. Whenever it felt slow I would speed it up, and whenever it felt too fast I would slow it down. Without paying much attention to the actual numbers I had reached over 3x within a month or so.

I tried this right now with the trick below. 2x was no issue but 3x... that was a big step. It sounded like word salad. As if my brain was decoding the words out of order and was unable to assemble them into sentences.

It also depends on the density of the original content. Some things flow nicely at 1.5; others can be cranked up to 3x or even beyond if you turn on subtitles because they're just another YouTube video padded to hit the magic 10 minute mark, or whatever it is now, and you don't really need the audio.

OP did it over a month, not a single session.

Is there a trick to get it above 2x (which is the cap in the UI). It'd be nice when watching videos of congress.

I do it via `document.getElementsByTagName("video")[0].playbackRate = 3.0` in the dev console. You can up arrow to it similar to a normal terminal on the next video. The nice thing about this is you can put any float in e.g. 3.333.

There are also extensions of course.

You can also put this:

  javascript:(function(){document.querySelector('video').playbackRate=3.0;})();

as a bookmark on your bookmarks bar.

The extension he probably used is Video Speed Controller; it works on any HTML5 video, and you're not limited by whatever UI they've wrapped around that built-in functionality.

Streaming and download/playback tools can offer greater flexibility. I typically use mpv, though other options are mps-youtube, or for download + playback, youtube-dl and xine, mplayer, mpv, mps, or VLC.

I find I can typically listen at 1.25 - 1.75 readily. Exceptionally poor content I'll bump to 2x. I don't generally go much above that unless I'm fast-forward scanning video for specific content.

I created a simple browser extension for this purpose, "YouTube Turbo Button". As mentioned in the other comment, it can be easily done through the console, but I found having a button for it more convenient.

Opening directly in `mpv` gives a wide range of speed control, has keyboard shortcuts for everything, and as an added bonus, skips ads by default.

It depends on the speaker. Some speakers are particularly slow with lots of long pauses and others are faster.

I think anyone can get to 3x but it takes some time to adjust to faster and faster speeds. It also depends on what you are doing while listening. Distractions or listening while doing something else (driving for example) lowers my ability to comprehend. For example on the interstate without much traffic I'll listen to audiobooks at 3x, but in a city or a crowded highway I have to slow it down.

Overcast has a great feature where it cuts out pauses and otherwise leaves the speed intact. It easily speeds up podcasts by 30% and more

FYI if anybody is interested in doing this without an app, check out ffmpeg's silenceremove filter.

Most decent podcast players also support this.

If you close your eyes listening comprehension goes way up. I top out around 2x if I have to look but with my eyes closed I can get full comprehension at 3x+

If it's a technical talk or something I'll still pause often too reflect on what was said, but I can hear full sentences just fine at >3x with my eyes closed.

Well I'm sure the ability requires training, but I wonder if it is specific to screen readers.

Consider what you quote: > we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts

Now the amount of relevant info on a screen is typically small enough that a sighted person can zero in on it at a glance and perhaps just click a button without thinking.

I.e. the amount of info that deserves "gathering our thoughts" is typically very small. So if that is the bottle-neck, your colleague can keep cranking up the audio speed until low-level processing audio becomes the bottle-neck, which is a regime that sighted people never deal with even, not even the nerds who speed up their Joe Rogan podcasts.

It's easy to train yourself to do that though. Just find your favorite audiobook and listen to it daily. First listen to it at 1.5x, then adjust to 2x after a few days, then 2.5x after a few more days etc. You'd be surprised how fast your brain can actually process the information.

Personally when I did this I feel irritated when I speak because my sped-up audiobooks have conditioned me into thinking I should be speaking at that rate, but it's just not possible for my mouth and tongue to move that fast physically.

I recommend. .2 step increases as .5 is too much. I also recommend silence skipping if your player supports it.

>But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension.

The deduction that is quoted does not follow: speeding up audio recordings with 120% results pressing both the auditory system as the language and thought systems (or any other potential bottleneck) to be sped up proportionally since it's a pipeline.

Similarily the posted article (I have yet to read the original one) states in the title that "human speech" has a universal transmission rate, but the research tested reading not speech, so this may or may not be true.

Perhaps the bottleneck is human speech, with the side effect that listening is never trained beyond the typical speech rate limit. (in this case the higher speed syllable languages would be easier to pronounce fast, and the lower speed ones harder to pronounce fast)

Perhaps the bottleneck was in the visual burden of reading, a language that encodes more bits per syllable implies more types of syllables, which irrespective of size or number of characters puts a classification demand on the visual system (classifying a symbol coming from a set of only 2 symbols will be easier, but will require more classification instances than classifying from a large set of characters but with fewer classification instances).

Perhaps the bottleneck was again in speech during reading by subconscious vocalizing of the text.

Perhaps the bottleneck was in the auditory "speech to syllable" classification.

Perhaps the bottleneck was in parsing text.

Perhaps the bottleneck was in "accessing thoughts" etc.

So it is rather hard to identify where the bottleneck is located without having a means of detecting where in the brain the "incoming queue is full" vs "incoming queue is waiting" during speaking, listening, reading. And which of these 3 causes this universal bottleneck (since I gave 2 examples of how an apparent bottleneck in reading could stem from not being trained beyond a possible universal bottleneck in speaking rate...)

That quote seems to imply that they have not measured the maximum speed to receive information but the speed at which we are comfortable outputing it.

There is no shortage of people training to receive a lot of information at once, and 39 bits per second seems to me on the lower end of what some video games require but in terms of constructed, linguistic output? They may be on to something there.

Fast chatters are not faster thinkers. I have yet to see people exchanging thought at a higher rate then usual.

> I wonder if his ability was trained through years of using fast screen readers, vs. a lower visual processing load leads to better audio processing, or some other explanation.

While I'm sure his visual cortex picked up some slack, I'm willing to bet it's mostly just through training. We just aren't trained for faster communication. I've known blind people and they are the same way with their readers.

For me I imagine the bottleneck would rather be how quickly I can translate my thoughts into speech. Oftentimes I will start out talking to myself to explain a topic, only to eventually digress into my "mental monologue" because I start to process thoughts faster than I can say them.

I'm fully sighted but I use espeak tts at around 1000wpd for fluff text like ecnomist articles and 300wpm for heavy going text like the text sections of math books.

I also watch most video at 2/3 times the speed since the skills seem transferable.

what flags do you use for espeak, just -s 1000 seems incomprehensible to me

-p 100 -s 1000 -v male7

Seems reasonable: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/superpowers-for-t...

I listen to youtube videos at 200%

What do i win???

I am blind, but I am not a primary speech synthesis user, I prefer tactile braille. However, I know a number of people which are using their speech synthesizers at rates similar to what you described above.

My theory/experience with this phenomenon is, that a speech synthesizer never makes any errors. When it pronounces a word, it will do so exactly the same way everytime the same word comes up. So the learning effect after a while is a bit higher then when you listen to a human. Humans will always have slight variation in how they pronounce the same word. So, as I understand it, you can "learn" to listen to your speech synthesizer on a fast rate more effectively then you would be able to listen to a fast human speaker.

And yes, I also listen to YouTube talks and audiboosk at about 1.5-2x rate. So I guess 80 bits per second is relatively easily doable for the receiver.

Depends on the natural speed of the speaker, but I listen to most podcasts and YouTube commentary/narrative at 2x. Podcasts sometimes in the 3x range.

Sometimes it's worth slowing down to 1.5x to give myself a bit of time to process the ideas, though slowing below that sometimes hurts comprehension.

Side note: I find that YouTube in Chrome has the best pitch-preserving time stretching filter, and I've neglected all this time to figure out what exactly they use to accomplish that. I'd love to add that to mpv, if it's not already there.

Probably this is a healthy reminder of how the brain optimizes and uses sections of itself. Without the need for vision, those cranial areas can be better used for other things.