Speed reading trainer for iPhone, iPad and Android
ReadSwift paces you a notch above your natural speed and ends every session with a five-question quiz. Pass it twice and the target rises. Miss it and the target eases. Five minutes a day.
Free to start. No account. Works offline. Passages in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
Pace Trainer, live
Down the Rabbit-Hole, Lewis Carroll
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?” So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
Past about 500 words per minute the eyes stop landing on every word. The app warns you here too.
Change the speed. In the app, the quiz at the end decides whether it moves.
ReadSwift is a speed reading trainer for iPhone, iPad and Android that raises your reading speed only as fast as your comprehension allows. A three-minute baseline test with five questions measures your real words per minute. Each daily drill then paces you about ten percent above that number: a highlight sweeps the page (Pace Trainer), one word flashes at a fixed point (RSVP Sprint), or words arrive in two-word phrases (Chunk Reading). Every session ends with a quiz. Score 75% twice in a row and the target rises 8%; drop below 60% and it eases 10%. The number you track is effective WPM, speed multiplied by comprehension. The library holds 38 public-domain passages in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, each with its own quiz. There is no account and no server: everything runs on the device, offline. ReadSwift is free to download with three drills a day; an optional Premium subscription unlocks unlimited training, every difficulty tier and baseline retakes. Built by Black Box Code LLC.
Measure first, then train just above the number, then let the quiz decide. The order matters, which is why it is numbered.
A three-minute passage read at your natural pace, no visible timer, then five questions. Most adults land near 240 words per minute. Your first target is set 10% above it.
One drill per day on the free tier, paced slightly above your baseline. The sweep will not wait, so your attention cannot drift. Pause when you need to; going back a sentence is always allowed.
Score 75% or better twice in a row and the target climbs 8%. Score under 60% and it drops 10%. Your chart tracks effective WPM, so a fast run you did not understand never counts as a win.
They train different habits, so the app rotates them. None of them promises more than the research does.
A highlight sweeps the page at your target speed, pausing a little at commas and longer at sentence ends and paragraph breaks. It is the classic reading pacer, automated, and the drill behind the acceleration protocol in the research. Keep up with the sweep, then prove it on the quiz.
One word at a time at a fixed focal point, each aligned on its optimal recognition letter so the eyes never move. Good for pushing past a plateau. Above about 450 WPM the app warns that comprehension usually drops, and a tap anywhere rewinds one sentence, because blocking re-reading is one of the things the research says never to do. More on RSVP reading.
Words arrive in two-word phrases, which is what the perceptual span actually allows (about 14 characters to the right of a fixation). Four-word chunks and "a whole line at a glance" are physiologically impossible, so ReadSwift does not sell them.
Effective WPM is your reading speed multiplied by your quiz score. It is the headline number on every screen in ReadSwift, and raw speed is never shown as an achievement on its own. The comparison on the right is why.
Past about 500 WPM, "reading" becomes skimming (Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter and Treiman, 2016).
A fast run
600 WPM x 40% understood
240
effective WPM
A real run
320 WPM x 90% understood
288
effective WPM, and the one that raises your target
ReadSwift is built on a written evidence base, and every feature has to trace back to a published finding. These are the four that shaped it most. The full review is in the guide.
A fixation lasts about 200 to 250 milliseconds and lands on roughly one word, so even perfect eyes cap out in the 500s. Trained "speed readers" tested at 600 to 700 WPM matched untrained skimmers on detail questions (Just, Carpenter and Masson, 1982). There is no documented case above 1,000 WPM with comprehension intact.
When researchers blocked re-reading, comprehension fell from about 75% to chance (Schotter, Tran and Rayner, 2014). That is why every ReadSwift drill lets you rewind a sentence, and why the app never locks you out of the text.
Suppressing subvocalization impaired comprehension without adding speed (Baddeley, Eldridge and Lewis, 1981). Bionic-style bolding showed no effect in a 2024 study and a 2,074-reader field test. ReadSwift builds neither.
Text that advances slightly faster than your measured rate, with comprehension questions gating progression, produced faster reading, fewer errors and better comprehension that held at a six-month follow-up (Breznitz, 2013; Horowitz-Kraus, 2014). Timed reading with quizzes added 40 to 110 WPM over a term (Chang and Millett, 2013; Cushing-Weigle and Jensen, 1996). That is the whole app.
Public-domain classics across warm-up, steady and challenge tiers: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, Moby-Dick, The Wind in the Willows, Walden and more. Passages and quizzes follow the app language, so Spanish, French and Portuguese readers train on translated text, not English with a translated menu.
Anyone whose bottleneck is reading speed with comprehension intact. In practice, four kinds of reader.
Timed reading sections on the SAT, GRE, GMAT, TOEFL and IELTS reward exactly what the drills train: steady pace, no re-reading loops, answers that hold. How to use it for exam prep.
The sweep gives your eyes somewhere to be. Training slightly above your natural pace is what breaks the habit of regressing out of doubt rather than need.
Reports, papers, contracts. Five minutes of paced practice before a long read warms up the pace, and the quiz habit keeps you honest about what you took in.
Reading speed in a second language lags vocabulary. Short, graded passages with comprehension checks are the protocol the ESL studies used, and the app's interface runs in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.
The free tier is a complete, usable trainer, not a demo. Premium removes the three limits below and nothing else.
| What you get | Free | Premium |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline speed test | One, free | Retake any time |
| Graded drills per day | 3 | Unlimited |
| Passage library | Warm-up tier | All 38 passages, every tier |
| Progress chart, streak, reminder | Included | Included |
| Account required | No | No |
Premium is a weekly or yearly auto-renewing subscription billed by Apple or Google. The price for your country is shown in the App Store or Google Play before you subscribe, and you can cancel any time in your store settings; access continues until the current period ends.
Short, sourced answers to the questions people ask before they trust a speed reading app.
The three habits that actually move the number, and the two that only feel like they do.
238 WPM for adults on non-fiction, and how to measure yours properly in three minutes.
What the 2016 review found, what is debunked, and the realistic 30 to 70% gain.
One word at a time: when it helps you past a plateau and where comprehension collapses.
A four-week paced-reading plan for timed reading sections.
It trains the one thing the research supports: reading a notch above your natural pace with comprehension questions gating every increase. Studies of paced reading (Breznitz's Reading Acceleration Program) and timed reading with quizzes report gains of roughly 40 to 110 words per minute over a term with comprehension held or improved. ReadSwift promises what that evidence supports, about 250 to 400 WPM with full understanding from a typical 240 WPM start, not 1,000 WPM. Results vary by reader and by text.
Adults silently read about 238 words per minute on non-fiction and 260 on fiction (Brysbaert 2019, a meta-analysis of 190 studies). College students land around 300 to 350. Past roughly 500 to 600 WPM the eyes can no longer fixate on each word, so what remains is skimming. ReadSwift's velocity band marks 500+ as the skimming zone for that reason.
Yes. The free tier includes the baseline speed test, the warm-up passages and three graded drills a day, with no account and no time limit. Premium is an optional weekly or yearly subscription that unlocks unlimited training, every difficulty tier and baseline retakes. Prices are shown in the App Store or Google Play before you subscribe, and you can cancel any time in your store settings.
Effective WPM is reading speed multiplied by comprehension. A 600 WPM run with 40% on the quiz is worth 240; a 320 WPM run with 90% is worth 288. ReadSwift shows and trains the effective number, so a faster run never counts as progress unless you also understood it.
The baseline test sets your starting target at about 10% above your measured speed. After each paced drill, scoring 75% or more on the quiz twice in a row raises the target 8%. Scoring under 60% lowers it 10%. Anything in between holds it. The target stays between 100 and 700 WPM.
Three. Pace Trainer sweeps a highlight across the page at your target speed, pausing a little at commas and longer at sentence ends. RSVP Sprint shows one word at a time at a fixed focal point, and a tap rewinds a sentence. Chunk Reading delivers two-word phrases so you practise reading groups instead of single words. Every drill ends with a five-question quiz.
Subvocalization suppression drills (suppressing inner speech hurts comprehension without adding speed), peripheral-vision expanders (a whole line at a glance is physiologically impossible), bionic-style bolding (no measured effect) and any 1,000 WPM promise. Each omission traces back to a published finding.
No account, no sign-up and no server. Your passages, history and streak stay on your device, and the app works fully offline. Analytics use a device identifier only, and purchases are handled by the App Store or Google Play.
Free to start, no account, and the app tells you when you are skimming instead of pretending you are not.