Read Timer

Read Timer provides an estimate in minutes of the time it will take to read an article on a webpage.

The user first enters his/her read speed in words/minute (WPM) in the options tab of the extension. This speed is further fine tuned by learning the user's average speed across pages as he uses the extension.

On clicking the Read Timer icon, the webpage is intelligently parsed to extract only the article text and ignore other navigational/HTML/advertisement content. The word count of the article text is obtained.

The read speed and the word count of the current article are then used to compute an estimate of the total time it will take to read the article. An estimate of the time remaining is also provided based on the user's current scroll position in the page.

Disclaimer: This extension is a work in progress. It has presently been tested only on blogs and may not be able to parse / produce inaccurate results for other kinds of websites. Please report any failure cases where you think such a feature would be useful by raising an issue at https://goo.gl/uU5mE8.
NOTE: Ensure you have the latest version of Google Chrome to run this extension.

Authored by Viraj Prabhu and Parameswaran D. The extension is open source and the code is available at https://goo.gl/2LOclw. Please contribute!