Dialogue RSVP v13

Read one of three complete public-domain short stories, import a local .txt file, or paste your own text. Play or pause with the button or Space. Dialogue colors, the optional anchor letter, italics, grammatical grouping, speed-scaled punctuation pauses, name slowdown, and actual reading-speed measurement remain available. Works offline in Chrome.

Choose a practice story

All three complete stories are embedded and work offline. You can also load your own plain-text file or paste text below.

Import a local text file
No file imported. No text is uploaded to a server.
Yellow and blue mean speech by default (red/blue is optional); italics mark parentheses or brackets. Speaker changes are inferred from paragraphs.
NarrationDialogue ADialogue BAnchor letter( )Parentheses / brackets: italic, same color
Load text to begin
Ready0 / 0 words
Actual reading speed—Shown when you pause or finish. Includes punctuation and name delays; excludes time paused.
One letter stays at the same screen position as the words change. Turn off to compare with ordinary centered flashes.
Red always marks the anchor; yellow and blue distinguish speakers.
Attach these word types forward Choose any combination. Uncheck all three for fixed-size grouping. A word in two lists (such as “for” or “since”) attaches when either category is selected; this is dictionary-based, not context-aware. Pronouns receive no special attachment.
Adds time, not color. Likely proper names are detected heuristically; ordinary sentence-opening words are mostly excluded.

Keyboard: Space play/pause; ←/→ back/next when not editing text. Commas, semicolons, periods, closing quotes and paragraph endings affect timing, scaled to WPM. Name slowdown adds a separate speed-scaled delay to flashes containing detected names. With “first appearance,” each distinct name component receives extra time only at its first occurrence in the passage, even when you pause and resume. Names are never assigned special colors. The detector excludes common sentence openers and the pronoun “I”; it may miss an unusual name or mistake a capitalized ordinary word for one. Em/en dashes separate adjoining words; internal hyphens (well-known) stay intact. Select articles, conjunctions, and prepositions independently for forward attachment; groups containing selected dependent words are ordinarily capped at three words. Disable all three for fixed word counts within sentence, punctuation and speaker boundaries. At the 3-word setting, “in the house” stays together, while “in the blue house” becomes “in the blue” → “house.” Selected WPM is the baseline before all pauses. Actual WPM counts completed words over real playback time, including punctuation and name delays but excluding manual pause time. Reset the measurement by restarting, loading new text, changing word grouping or seeking.

How colors and italics are assigned

Straight and curly single and double quotation marks are supported. Contractions (don’t, won't), possessives (John's, students’), and common leading apostrophes ('90s, ’tis) are not treated as speech delimiters. Single quotations nested inside double quotations inherit the enclosing speech color. The reader alternates dialogue colors at the first new quotation in each paragraph and keeps the same color when dialogue resumes after an attribution in that paragraph. It also preserves color for a quotation continuing across paragraphs without a closing mark. It cannot reliably identify actual speakers from prose: two different speakers sharing one paragraph, nonalternating turns, and some unusual nested quotation conventions may require manual paragraph formatting. Text in (parentheses) and [brackets] is italic, including the delimiters, without changing quotation color. Nested and multi-word asides are supported; unbalanced delimiters italicize to the end of the passage. Selected article, conjunction and preposition groupings are computed within those boundaries; auxiliary verbs, negation and pronouns receive no special grouping. Unspaced em/en dashes split words without changing internal hyphenated compounds. Punctuation pause lengths are measured in word-time units, so they scale with speed. The three bundled complete stories, imported TXT files and any pasted text remain on your computer; opening an external source link visits an external site.