iReader is an interesting new technology that allows you to see the summary of a web page before opening it. When moving over a link, a box is displayed next to the link outlining the contents of the linked page, processed by a “Natural Language Processor”. Condensed in some bullet points, you can see the main idea of a page.
Of course, this is not without complications. The language processing algorithm used at Syntactica may not always find the essence of a text, and the short summary it displays is certainly not fluent English. Of course, the technology used still has to mature, and by releasing this alpha version to the public, they’re ensuring they will get quite a lot of valuable feedback. It has only been a month since the first public release, and several new revisions incorporating user suggestions have already been made.
Currently, iReader is available as a plug-in for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. However, there’s also an open API for developers, so other applications can rely on the technology behind iReader to get abstracts of texts too. This could have some interesting uses, for example in search engines, or to quickly view the summary of, for example, a PDF document. If the quality of the language processor improves, I could see a lot of uses of this technology, but I think we’ll have to go through many years of development before this solution becomes really usable.
