When we read blocks of texts, it takes time for our eyes to travel from word to word. We can only read as fast as we can speak because that’s the way we were taught to read.

So at McHacks 2015, we made Parrot. Parrot is an app that lets you save articles, blog posts, or books to read later—even without an Internet connection. However, unlike other offline content savers, Parrot significantly enhances our reading speed by flashing a single word one at a time at a very high rate instead of simply displaying blocks of text.

Here’s how it works:

1. Find an interesting article or piece of writing online and use a google chrome extension to save it
2. The writing of the article will be saved into your phone app
3. Whenever you want to read the article, just find it in your library and start speedreading!

The app also features:

• adjustable words per minute: beginners can start at 200 wpm (the average adult reading speed) while veterans can read at 1000 wpm.
• bookmarking, favorites, & sharing
• the ability to pause the words by pressing your finger against the screen
• instant transfer of text from browser to app
• support for Pocket & delicious

You can view the DevPost here and see the source code here. We ended up winning third place in the hackathon.