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For version 2.7 · Updated October 19, 2026

JK RapidReader User Guide

Setting up and using every part of JK RapidReader, step by step.

This guide walks you through setting up JK RapidReader and using every part of it: speed reading, listening, following sites with RSS, saving anything, AI summaries, quizzes and chat, and keeping your library in a folder you own. New here? Read Getting started, then jump to whatever you need.

Contents

Getting started

1. Install

Install JK RapidReader from the Chrome Web Store and click Add to Chrome. It works in Chrome and other Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc). Pin it to your toolbar: click the puzzle-piece icon, then the pin next to JK RapidReader.

2. First-time setup

The reader opens on a short setup the first time:

  1. Where would you like to store your data? Click Choose Folder and pick (or create) a folder, for example Documents/RapidReader. Your articles, notes and settings are saved there as ordinary files. If the folder already holds a RapidReader library, you can load it.
  2. Dyslexia-Friendly Mode: turn it on if it helps you; you can change it any time.
  3. Set Your Reading Speed: a comfortable starting speed (300 words a minute is a good start) and a target to build up to.
  4. Pick Your Theme: dark, light or sepia.
  5. AI Features (Optional): skip this for now if you like. Everything except the AI tools works without it. See Setting up AI.

3. Read something

Go to any article, highlight some text, right-click and choose Read it Fast. The reader opens with your text ready. Press Space to start and pause.

Speed reading

RapidReader shows text one word at a time in one spot (this is called RSVP, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation). Your eyes stay still instead of jumping along lines, and the clutter of the page disappears. A highlighted letter in each word gives your eye an anchor.

The controls

  • Play / pause: the play button, or Space.
  • Speed: ◀ and ▶ (or the ← and → keys) change it by 25 words a minute. Click the speed itself to type an exact number.
  • The progress bar: click anywhere on it to jump there. Words read, words left and time remaining are shown.
  • Reset (R) goes back to the start; Home and End jump to the start or end.
  • Chapters: books and long documents get a table of contents (T) and previous/next chapter ([ and ]).
  • Search (S) finds a word or phrase in the text and jumps to it.
  • View Text shows the whole text normally, to read or edit.
  • ✓ Finish ends the session and takes you back to your library. Your place is saved, so Continue picks up where you stopped.

Getting faster, comfortably

  • Warm-up (Settings → Reading Speed): reading starts at your start speed and builds to your target over a few seconds.
  • Pauses: RapidReader lingers a little at commas and full stops, so sentences don’t run together. Adjust how long in Settings.
  • Start around 300 words a minute and raise it gradually. Going faster trades some detail for speed: slow down for the parts that matter, and use a quiz to check what stuck.

Read to Me (text to speech)

  • Click 🔊 Read to Me in the reader to have the text read aloud, with each word highlighted as it is spoken.
  • Use the on-screen controls to pause, stop, or go faster or slower.
  • Choose a voice and default speed in Settings → Text-to-Speech. Browser Voice uses your computer’s voices, free and offline. AI Voice (experimental) uses natural-sounding OpenAI voices with your own OpenAI key.

Saving articles, PDFs and books

  • Highlighted text: highlight, right-click, ⚡ Read it Fast.
  • A link: right-click any link and choose 🚀 Read Link Fast or 📚 Add Link to Library.
  • The page you’re on: right-click the page and choose 📚 Add Page to Library.
  • A web address: on Home, paste the address and click Fetch.
  • Files: on Home, click Browse or drag a file in: PDF, EPUB, Word (DOCX), RTF, Markdown, plain text or HTML.
  • Documents behind a link: with LiveLinks on (Settings), right-click a link to a PDF or document and choose 📖 Add Document to RapidReader.
  • Paste: on Home, click Paste Text.

The first time RapidReader fetches a web page (importing an address, adding a feed, or opening a link), Chrome asks whether to allow it. Click Allow. RapidReader asks then, rather than at install.

Messy text? In View Text, the free cleanup tools remove menus, ads and leftover clutter in one click, and AI cleanup can tidy a badly formatted document. If an import could only get a summary, your library says why (blocked, no longer available, site error) and offers Re-fetch.

Your library

  • Read or Continue any item; Start Over begins again.
  • Search titles and text; filter by Favourites, Reading, ⚡ Quick (things you can finish in about five minutes) and Done; filter by tag.
  • Sort by last read, published date, last updated, date added, or Freshest First, which lets old news sink while a good tutorial stays near the top. Each item shows its age and kind (News, Evergreen, Reference); click the label to change how it ages.
  • Tags, ☆ favourites, archive, and Select to act on several items at once.
  • The small buttons on each item open its text, its AI chat, a summary, notes, and any quiz, flashcards or key takeaways you’ve made. 🗨️ starts an AI Chat with that article as its background.
  • Share copies an article as markdown, downloads it, or sends it by email or message.

RSS feeds: keep up with sites and topics

  1. Open Feeds.
  2. Add a feed: paste a site’s address or its feed address and click Add. Not sure where a feed is? Open the directory of feeds by category, or use Feed Scout: describe a topic and AI suggests feeds worth following (needs AI set up).
  3. Click Refresh Feeds to fetch the latest. Feeds update when you refresh them.
  4. Browse new items, or search across everything your feeds brought in. Save searches you run often.
  5. Click + Add to Library on an item to save it with the full article text, then read it, listen to it, or ask AI about it.

Each feed is labelled News or Evergreen from how often it publishes, which decides how quickly its articles age in your library. Click the label to change it.

Setting up AI (optional)

AI powers summaries, quizzes, flashcards, key takeaways, cleanup, Feed Scout and chat. Choose one or more in Integrations:

Option A: a cloud AI, with your own key

  1. Get an API key from Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini) or xAI (Grok).
  2. In Integrations → Cloud Providers, paste it and save. Your key stays on your computer.
  3. Pick a default model for each provider, and your preferred provider.

You pay the provider for what you use; RapidReader shows the cost of each chat message before you send it, and keeps a running total.

Option B: free, private AI on your own computer with Ollama

  1. Install Ollama and download a model, for example in Terminal: ollama pull mistral
  2. Let browser extensions use it. On a Mac, in Terminal: launchctl setenv OLLAMA_ORIGINS "chrome-extension://*" then quit Ollama from the menu bar and open it again. (On Windows or Linux, set the environment variable OLLAMA_ORIGINS to chrome-extension://* and restart Ollama.)
  3. In Integrations → Ollama, enter http://localhost:11434, click 🧪 Test, and choose your model.
  4. Optional: Ollama Context Window lets a local model read more of a long document at once (8K to 128K), at the cost of more memory.

Summaries, quizzes, flashcards and takeaways

In the reader, use the buttons under the text:

  • Summary: a brief, standard or detailed summary, or the key points. It’s saved with the article. You can also have new imports summarised automatically (Settings → AI Summaries; this uses your AI key).
  • Quiz: multiple-choice questions on what you just read, graded, with explanations.
  • Flashcards: cards to review the key ideas.
  • Key takeaways: the main points in a few lines.

Everything you generate is saved with the article and reachable from its row in your library.

AI Chat

Ask about what you’re reading

In the reader, click AI to open a chat about the current article.

Chat with a whole book or a stack of documents

  1. Open Chat and start a new chat (or click 🗨️ on a library item).
  2. Click + Add Background Context: paste text, Import file, or 📚 Add from library. Press Save.
  3. Optionally, add Instructions (how the AI should answer in this chat) and choose its model.
  4. Ask away. The line under the message box shows what the message will send and cost before you send it.

Long documents. When the background is too long for the AI, RapidReader sends only the passages most relevant to your question, and each reply says how many, for example “8 of 332 passages”. Click that line to see which ones. The Relevant passages / Whole context button lets you choose passages for any chat, which is much cheaper for long documents.

Turn what you read into something new

Ask the chat to write a LinkedIn post, an X thread, an email, a newsletter section, a lesson plan or a briefing from the article. Save requests you use often in the Prompt Library and reuse them in one click.

More chat tools

  • Attach files, web links or images; ask about an image, or generate one (choose an image model in Integrations).
  • Copy a chat, export it as markdown, save it to your library, delete a message, or ask for the last reply again.
  • Each chat remembers its own background, instructions, model and history; a search box appears once you have several.

Notes, bookmarks and stats

  • Notes: add a note while reading; it’s tied to that exact place, and clicking it takes you back there.
  • Bookmarks (B to add, Shift-B to list) mark places to come back to.
  • Readwise: connect your Readwise account in Integrations to send articles and your notes there.
  • Stats: your day streak, words read this week against a goal you choose, a reading calendar, your speed over time, and when in the day you read.

Make it yours

In Settings:

  • Theme (dark, light, sepia), font, font size and letter spacing.
  • Dyslexia-Friendly Mode: one switch for settings that help many dyslexic readers, plus dyslexia-friendly fonts.
  • Reading mode and focus style: how the focus letter is marked, word alignment, a bolded-reading mode, Peripheral Preview (see the next word coming) and Chunk Mode (several words at a time).
  • Sound: gentle feedback sounds, with several sound packs, or off.
  • Full keyboard control, and support for screen readers.

Your folder and backups

Every article is a plain markdown file in your folder, with its notes, quizzes and chat beside it. You can:

  • Back it up or sync it like any folder, for example inside Dropbox or Google Drive.
  • Open it in Obsidian or any editor. Edit an article and RapidReader picks up the change; drop a new .md note into the library folder and it becomes an article.
  • Back up everything to one file, or restore one, in Integrations → Data Management.
  • Use a different folder: Settings → About → Change folder…

“Your folder is disconnected.” Browsers forget folder access when the last RapidReader tab closes. Click Reconnect, then Allow. In Chrome, Edge or Brave, choose Allow on every visit and it stays connected. Arc doesn’t offer that choice, so expect one click per fresh visit there; keeping one RapidReader tab pinned avoids even that.

Keyboard shortcuts

While reading:

  • Space: play / pause
  • ← / →: slower / faster
  • Home / End: jump to start / end
  • R: back to the beginning
  • S: search in the text
  • T: table of contents
  • [ / ]: previous / next chapter
  • B: add a bookmark · Shift-B: list bookmarks
  • Esc: close / go back

In your library, ↑ / ↓ move between articles and Enter opens one. Press ? anywhere for the full list.

Troubleshooting

“Your folder is disconnected”

Click Reconnect and Allow (see Your folder). If a folder picker opens instead, choose the same folder; it reconnects without asking anything else.

A web page, link or feed won’t load

If Chrome asked for permission to fetch web pages and you said no, click Allow on the banner in Feeds, or try the import again and choose Allow. Some sites block automated reading or need a login; the library will say so and offer Re-fetch.

AI chat gives an error

  • Invalid key: check the key in Integrations, and that your account with the provider has credit.
  • “Ollama refused the request (403)”: Ollama hasn’t been told to trust browser extensions. Run the OLLAMA_ORIGINS command in Setting up AI, then quit and reopen Ollama.
  • “Will not be sent”: the conversation plus its background is too big for that model. Switch the chat to Relevant passages, clear some history, or pick a model with a larger window.

A PDF won’t open

Encrypted (password-protected) PDFs can’t be read. Download the file and import it with Browse instead of a link.

Still stuck?

Get in touch through the Reach Out page. Mentioning your version (Settings → About) helps.

JK RapidReader is free. © 2026 John Kirker Inc. All rights reserved. See our privacy policy.