How much faster is speaking?
We think you are faster with your voice. Here is the stopwatch rather than the assertion.
Only after the typing half? The typing speed test gives you one fixed paragraph, marks every wrong key as you make it and stops the clock by itself. No microphone.
Is dictating actually faster than typing?
For prose, almost always: 40 to 70 words a minute typed against 120 to 160 spoken. What closes the gap again is correction — if you fix every third word the advantage is gone, which is why your own numbers beat any published figure.
Input speed only. It says nothing about whether the text is any good, and dictation is a poor fit for anything punctuation-dense — code above all.
“Faster, but it makes mistakes”
So does typing — about one keystroke in sixteen is a correction, measured across 136 million of them. In the one study that put both methods in the same experiment, the keyboard needed more than twice the mid-entry correction work. We publish our own word error rate and the method behind it, which is more than the keyboard has ever been asked for. The numbers, and where they come from.
So what does that come to?
2.5× is the middle of the 2-to-3× range this page publishes. Run the test above to use your own figure.
Writing only — not meetings or reading.
2 h of writing becomes about 50 min — roughly 1 h 10 min back, every day.
Free tier: 30 minutes a month, no card.
How that is worked out
2.0 h ÷ 2.5 = 0.80 h spoken, so 2.0 − 0.80 = 1.20 h. Rounded to five minutes, because both numbers above are estimates.
Common questions
How fast do people speak?+
Conversational speech runs at about 150 words a minute, and dictation sits near that because you are talking at an ordinary pace rather than reading aloud.
Does speaking faster mean finishing sooner?+
Only for the part that is typing. Deciding what to say, looking things up and rewriting take the same time either way, so a two-times input speed is not a two-times working day. The calculator on this page asks how much of your day is writing for exactly that reason.
Why measure my own rate instead of using yours?+
Because the published averages are wide and yours is a single number. A fast typist gains less; someone who writes long formulaic documents gains more. The test on the typing-speed page takes under a minute and stores nothing.
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