We have typed for 150 years. In that time the keyboard became the default way to put words into a machine, and typing speed became something people test, train for, and list on résumés. Talking never needed the training, and it was always faster. This guide gathers the best public research on how fast people speak, read, and type, explains why the published numbers disagree, and shows how to measure your own pace in two minutes.
The short answer: most English speakers talk at about 150 to 200 words per minute. A University of Pennsylvania study of thousands of phone calls measured 164 to 196 wpm, depending on how pauses are counted, and adults read aloud at about 183 wpm. Typing is far slower: about 52 wpm on a keyboard and 36 on a touchscreen.
The research figures below come from peer-reviewed studies and one published professional standard, each linked where it appears.
Speaking, reading, and typing speeds at a glance
Activity | Typical rate | Source |
|---|---|---|
Conversation, timed turn by turn | 164 wpm | Yuan, Liberman and Cieri (2006) |
Conversation, whole call including pauses | 196 wpm | Yuan, Liberman and Cieri (2006) |
Conversation, silences removed | 236 wpm | Yuan, Liberman and Cieri (2006) |
Reading aloud | 183 wpm | Brysbaert (2019) |
Silent reading, nonfiction | 238 wpm | Brysbaert (2019) |
Silent reading, fiction | 260 wpm | Brysbaert (2019) |
Testimony a certified court reporter must capture | 225 wpm | NCRA skills test |
Dictating short messages on a phone, fixes included | 153 wpm | Ruan et al. (2017) |
Typing the same messages on a phone keyboard | 52 wpm | Ruan et al. (2017) |
Typing on a computer keyboard | 52 wpm | Dhakal et al. (2018) |
Typing on a mobile touchscreen, 37,370 volunteers | 36 wpm | Palin et al. (2019) |
How many words per minute do people speak?
The most careful measurements come from speech researchers who time real conversations rather than asking people to read a passage. Jiahong Yuan, Mark Liberman, and Christopher Cieri of the University of Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium studied large collections of recorded telephone calls in English and Chinese (Interspeech 2006). In the English Switchboard corpus, where two strangers talk about an assigned topic, the same calls produced three different speaking rates depending on how the time was counted:
- 196 wpm when all the words both people said are divided by the length of the call. Individual calls ranged from 111 to 291 wpm.
- 236 wpm when silences and noise are removed and only speech is timed, with a range of 158 to 312 wpm.
- 164 wpm when each person's turns are timed separately and added up. Turns overlap so much that the summed turn times run longer than the call itself, which pulls the rate down.
That spread explains why answers to this question disagree. The often-quoted figure of 150 words per minute sits at the slow end of these measurements, not in the middle.
The same study found that speaking rate shifts with the situation:
- Who you are talking to. Calls between friends and family ran at 214 wpm, against 193 wpm for calls between strangers, about a 10% difference.
- What you are talking about. Average rates by assigned topic ranged from 152 to nearly 170 wpm.
- Age. Older speakers tended to talk more slowly.
- Sex. Men spoke slightly faster than women, by about 4 to 5 words per minute (2%).
- How long you hold the floor. Very short turns are slower per word. The rate rises quickly up to about seven words, holds roughly steady through medium turns, and creeps up again in long ones.
Professional stenographers are tested at conversational speed, too: to earn the Registered Professional Reporter credential, a court reporter must transcribe testimony dictated at 225 wpm with 95% accuracy (NCRA).
Reading a script aloud lands in the same range. Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of 77 studies with 5,965 participants puts the average oral reading rate for adults at 183 wpm (Journal of Memory and Language).
Average typing speed on a keyboard and a phone
For typing, two large online studies led by Aalto University in Finland give the clearest picture. The first, from 2018, collected 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers who copied sentences in an online typing test (Dhakal et al., CHI 2018):
- The average was 51.56 wpm (standard deviation 20.2).
- The fastest tenth typed above about 78 wpm and the slowest tenth below about 26. The very fastest reached 120 wpm or more.
- People who had taken a typing course were only about 5 wpm faster than people who had not.
The second, from 2019, asked 37,370 volunteers to do the same on mobile touchscreens and found an average of 36.2 wpm, with 2.3% of errors left uncorrected (Palin et al., MobileHCI 2019). About 74% typed with two thumbs, which was faster than typing with one thumb or one finger, and autocorrect use went with faster typing while picking words from the prediction bar went with slower typing.
Two cautions apply to both studies. The volunteers chose to take a typing test, so they are a self-selected group rather than a random sample. And both tests measured transcription, copying sentences shown on screen. Writing your own words adds thinking time to typing and speaking alike. The 40 wpm figure quoted in many articles, including on our own home page, sits between the phone and keyboard averages.
Is speaking faster than typing?
Yes, by about three times on a phone, according to the most direct comparison published. Researchers from Stanford, the University of Washington, and Baidu had 24 native English speakers and 24 native Mandarin speakers enter short phrases on an iPhone 6 Plus, once with the built-in iOS keyboard and once by speaking to Baidu's Deep Speech 2 recognizer, fixing mistakes as they went (Ruan et al., 2017).
- English: 153 wpm by voice against 52 wpm by keyboard, 2.93 times faster.
- Mandarin: 123 wpm against 43 wpm, 2.87 times faster.
- Errors: speech made fewer errors along the way (a 5.30% corrected error rate against 11.22%) but left slightly more in the finished text (1.30% against 0.79%).
The authors are explicit about the limits. Participants sat in a quiet room and copied short phrases, a setup designed to show each method's upper bound. They also note an argument that composing at a keyboard interferes less with thinking than composing out loud. Even so, the speech results included the time spent fixing recognition errors, and speech was still nearly three times faster.
On a computer the arithmetic is similar. Conversational speech at 164 to 196 wpm is roughly three to four times a 52 wpm typing speed. Our own home page puts it at five times, comparing dictation with Aqua at up to 230 wpm against typing at 40 wpm. Both of those are our figures, not results from these studies.
Reading speed versus speaking speed
People read faster than they speak, but not as fast as the popular 300 wpm figure suggests. Brysbaert's meta-analysis of 190 studies with 18,573 participants puts the average silent reading rate for adults reading English at 238 wpm for nonfiction and 260 wpm for fiction, with most adults between 175 and 300 wpm for nonfiction. Reading aloud averages 183 wpm.
That makes typing the slow link in the chain. A reader takes in nonfiction at about 238 wpm, a little faster than conversation and about four and a half times faster than average typing.
How many words is a 5-minute speech?
Multiply your pace by the length of the talk. Speakers vary, so the table shows three planning paces, and the next section shows how to measure yours.
Length | At 130 wpm | At 150 wpm | At 180 wpm |
|---|---|---|---|
1 minute | 130 words | 150 words | 180 words |
3 minutes | 390 words | 450 words | 540 words |
5 minutes | 650 words | 750 words | 900 words |
10 minutes | 1,300 words | 1,500 words | 1,800 words |
20 minutes | 2,600 words | 3,000 words | 3,600 words |
Working the other way, a 1,000-word script runs about 7.7 minutes at 130 wpm, 6.7 minutes at 150 wpm, and 5.6 minutes at 180 wpm. Leave room for pauses, laughter, and questions.
How to measure your own speaking rate
The easiest method doubles as a dictation test, which is the number that matters if you want to type less.
- Open a blank document in Google Docs, Word, or any notes app.
- Start dictation. On a Mac, press the Microphone key or your dictation shortcut (how). On Windows, press Windows key + H (guide). On a phone, tap the microphone on your keyboard (iPhone, Android).
- Talk for two minutes about something you know well, such as your work or your week. Keep going instead of stopping to fix mistakes.
- Count the words. In Google Docs, choose Tools, then Word count (Google's help page). Most editors have a similar counter.
- Divide by the minutes. 340 words in two minutes is 170 wpm.
- Repeat with the keyboard. Type about the same topic for two minutes and count again. Both runs include thinking time, so the comparison is fair.
To time a script instead, record yourself reading it aloud and divide its word count by the running time.
Why talking speed matters more now
For most of computing history the gap was easy to live with. Emails were short, documents were edited more than drafted, and the reader was another person who could fill in the blanks. AI tools changed the math. A good prompt for a coding agent or an assistant is a paragraph of context: what you want, what you have tried, what to avoid. At 52 wpm that paragraph is a chore, so people send one line and get a generic answer. At speaking speed the same paragraph takes seconds, which is why voice has become a natural way of coding with AI agents and working in Claude Code.
Speed only helps if the words come out right, though. Three things eat dictation's head start:
- Corrections. Every misheard word costs a trip back to the keyboard.
- Names and jargon. A general-purpose recognizer that has never seen your product names gets them wrong, and keeps getting them wrong.
- Cleanup. Raw transcripts keep every "um" and false start, so a fast draft still needs a slow edit.
Dictating at the speed you talk with Aqua Voice
We build Aqua Voice, so weigh this section accordingly. Aqua is a dictation app that types into any app on your computer or phone, built so that the limit is how fast you think, not how fast you type.
- Built to keep up. Aqua keeps up with dictation at up to 230 wpm, a self-reported figure above the conversational averages in this guide. Text starts appearing in under 50ms and final text lands in about 450ms (also self-reported).
- Fewer fixes. In 9to5Mac's side-by-side test, built-in Mac dictation made 17 errors on the same passage where Aqua made 1 (one passage, one speaker). Aqua runs on Avalon, our own speech model, which was the #1 proprietary model on the OpenASR leaderboard at its October 2025 debut.
- A dictionary you fill once. Add names, product terms, and jargon, and they come out right from then on.
- Clean text, then edit by voice. Aqua punctuates automatically, and with Edit Mode you select a sentence, hold the key, and say the change.
- Push to talk everywhere. Hold Fn on a Mac, hold your Aqua key on Windows, switch to the Aqua keyboard on iPhone, or tap the button above your keyboard on Android (launch post, Google Play).
The honest limits: Aqua transcribes in the cloud, so it needs an internet connection, and it supports 49 languages. The Free plan includes 1,000 words with no card required; Pro is $10/mo billed annually or $12/mo month to month, and one subscription covers Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android (app store billing may differ). Aqua has a SOC 2 Type II audit report and is ISO 27001 certified, and it is GDPR and HIPAA compliant. The guide covers setup, and our roundup of the best dictation software compares the alternatives.
FAQ
What is the average speaking rate in words per minute?
About 150 to 200 wpm for English conversation. In Yuan, Liberman and Cieri's study of recorded phone calls, the rate was 164 wpm timed turn by turn and 196 wpm across the whole call. Reading aloud averages about 183 wpm (Brysbaert, 2019).
Is 150 words per minute fast or slow?
For conversation, 150 wpm is on the relaxed side: average rates by topic in the Penn phone-call study ran from 152 to nearly 170 wpm, and whole calls averaged 193 to 196 wpm. For a talk there is no single right pace, so time a rehearsal and adjust from there.
What is the average typing speed?
About 52 wpm on a computer keyboard (51.56 wpm across 168,960 volunteers in Dhakal et al., 2018) and about 36 wpm on a mobile touchscreen (36.2 wpm across 37,370 volunteers in Palin et al., 2019). The often-quoted 40 wpm sits between the two.
How much faster is speaking than typing?
About three times. In the Stanford, University of Washington, and Baidu study, speech on an iPhone was 2.93 times faster than the keyboard (153 against 52 wpm), including the time spent fixing errors. On a computer, conversational speech at 164 to 196 wpm is roughly three to four times a 52 wpm typing speed.
