Preamble
RSVP reading is a really cool way to read things FAST, but it’s not a new concept at all. Click here to read this article using my RSVP reader or try it out with your own content. (Please note: some of the typos and grammar concerns surfaced by the RSVP reader are left in intentionally to demonstrate its capability.)
Article
With AI technology accelerating our ability to create content, for better or worse, the biggest AI companies are now burdened with preaching what any seasoned marketer should know to do anyway: check the work.
Having lived in the world of long-winded documents haphazardly generated without sufficient human oversight and delivered with unceremonious “what do you think?” Slack messages, I started thinking about ways by which I could use AI technology to further accelerate the still-human components of what Marketers and PR teams need to achieve. Great output or not, human people still bear the responsibility for its quality.
My idea started out of a need to internalize significant course content in the interest of some Anthropic certifications our organization is requesting everyone to achieve. Of all places, instagram provided me with a solution in the form of an advertisement for a speed-reading app that leverages RSVP. I was shocked at how fast I could actually get through the words and also retain the meaning from what was flashing across the screen.
That, for me, was a great way to consume written content, but I wanted something that could also help accelerate the actual evaluation of the copy: checking for proper grammar and typos, things that seemed to be only somewhat available, and typically with a hefty paid subscription.
With all these ‘requirements’ floating in my head I decided to try my hand at vibe-coding an app for myself that would achieve this. Using Anthropic Claude, I started testing the waters with a prompt that seemed to articulate what I was after. Anthropic’s training courses are very clear about the perils of ambiguity in your prompting, but for the sake of the experiment, I went with this:
I want to construct a very simple application that allows me to paste some text copy into a field, then display that text copy for reading by way of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP). An example can be found at readrrr.app Importantly, i want the application to highlight a letter of each word in read the same way the readrrr.app example does.
The application in question should run locally via macos. Ask me questions about what you need in order to create this.
Claude answered back with some questions about the format the final app should take, I wanted something universal, which brought me toward a simple HTML file that could be used on nearly any device.
A few more back and forths with Claude had me adding more of the things I wanted:
- Spelling and grammar checking via a free grammar API
- The option to add a pause after titles and hard returns (this improved my ability to understand the composition of the moving copy FAR more easily.)
- Some quality of life features like light and dark mode, a color picker for the anchor letter, and a responsive layout to accommodate mobile devices.
The result can be found here. It’s by no means perfect, but makes for an interesting example of how AI tech can actually help expand human limitations as well.