About BriskRead

BriskRead started out of frustration with modern reading apps. Most speed readers, audio narration tools like Speechify, and bionic text formatters charge $10 to $30 a month or lock basic PDF uploads behind a paywall.

We built BriskRead to be free to use, fast, quiet, and private by default.

Core Philosophy

1. Local-First & Private

Your books and articles are personal. You should not have to upload files to a remote server just to read them. All of BriskRead's PDF/EPUB parsing, Text-to-Speech syncing, and image OCR run inside your browser. Your documents stay on your device.

2. Dual-Channel Reading

Flashing words fast is useless if you forget the paragraph five seconds later. BriskRead pairs RSVP (Rapid Serial Visual Presentation) with synchronized Text-to-Speech audio so your eyes and ears follow the same word stream. Hearing the word as you see it helps hold attention on long reports. Because results vary by reader and text difficulty, you can toggle audio off or switch to Bionic, Focus, or Page mode at any point. See how the six reading modes work.

3. Free, Without Asterisks

Every feature is free for everyone: unlimited document length, the full library, all reading modes, the reading speed test, words to minutes calculator, online teleprompter, readability checker, and the Chrome extension. No account is required to read. The site is funded by display ads rather than paywalls.

Technical Stack

BriskRead is built with Astro and compiles to static HTML with client-side browser engines loaded only when needed:

• Web Speech API for synced local voice synthesis.
• pdfjs-dist for client-side PDF text extraction.
• JSZip for client-side EPUB decompression.
• Tesseract.js via WebAssembly for on-device image OCR.