Seconded. After I saw and heard how blind people use screen readers (with experience), I started accelerating audio. You can train your brain to become better at understanding — I started at 1.25x and slowly worked my way up. I am now at 1.75x - 2x (plus Overcast's silence removal) and I have no problems, even though English isn't my native language.
Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use it also for listening to audiobooks.
I also think the article is misinformed. You can speed read by regularly training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the "experts" who try to sell you miracles.
Well I haven't tested a lot of them so not sure if it's relevant but I use DoggCatcher as a player and another app called Presto that shims the Android audio layer to increase the speech rate transparently for the player app. It's Presto that uses the Sonic library.
Hmm, now you got me worried. I use a dedicated device for podcasts that is still running Android 2.x. Prestissimo seems to be the new name, but itself deprecated in Android 6.0. I'll have to look into that before that device dies.
Two requirements: headphones (you need much more processing power to deal with crappy speakers and poor audio in general) and lack of significant distractions (you can't afford to think about something else). Also, some apps have crappy audio acceleration algorithms. Overcast does it so well that I use it also for listening to audiobooks.
I also think the article is misinformed. You can speed read by regularly training your brain. Just don't expect miracles and don't believe the "experts" who try to sell you miracles.