Words per minute

Speaking rate: how fast words leave your mouth in conversation, 120 to 160 for most people. Typing-test speed: copying text you can see, 40 to 60 for a competent typist, higher for a fast one. Composition speed: writing something new at a keyboard, about 31 to 40, because most of the time is spent deciding what to say. Comparisons that put a speaking rate against a typing-test score flatter dictation; the honest comparison is delivered dictation against composition typing, and it still comes out around four to one.

Delivered WPM is the number of finished words that landed in your document, divided by the wall-clock time from the first key-down to the last text insertion, including the pauses where you thought, the corrections you spoke, and the tool’s own latency. It is the only WPM that predicts how much time you get back, and it is the one almost nobody publishes because it has to be measured on real dictations rather than a benchmark.

At 2,000 words a day, moving from 31 WPM composition to 124 WPM delivered dictation returns about 48 minutes a day, which is roughly four hours a week and five working weeks a year. The arithmetic is simple and the assumption that matters is the 2,000: a support agent or a founder clearing an inbox is above it, a developer writing mostly code is below it. Slide the number to your day before you believe the result.

Published averages tell you little about your own day. A stopwatch and one terminal command give you a number you can trust. Measure a real task, such as replying to an email, not a passage you read aloud.

1. 01 Choose a real piece of writing you need to do, and open the app you would normally write it in.
2. 02 Start a timer at the moment you begin dictating, and do not pause it while you think.
3. 03 Dictate the whole piece, fix any errors the way you normally would, and stop the timer when the text is ready to send.
4. 04 Select the finished text and copy it with ⌘C.
5. 05 Open Terminal and run: pbpaste | wc -w
6. 06 Divide the word count by the minutes on the timer. For example, 300 words in 2.5 minutes is 120 WPM.
7. 07 Repeat the same kind of task by typing, and compare the two numbers.

The figure comes from a 2016 study by researchers at Stanford University, the University of Washington, and Baidu. It is worth knowing exactly what was measured. The comparison was speech recognition against a touchscreen smartphone keyboard, not a desktop keyboard.

In that setting, English text entry by speech was 3.0 times faster than the keyboard, and Mandarin Chinese was 2.8 times faster. The error rate with speech was also lower: 20.4 percent lower for English and 63.4 percent lower for Mandarin.

The result supports a clear claim about phones. It does not, on its own, tell you the ratio at a full-size keyboard, which is why measuring your own speed is the better evidence for your own desk.

If your measured number is well below your speaking rate, the cause is almost always time that is not speech. These are the usual places it goes.

• Thinking time. Pauses between sentences count against the clock, exactly as they do when you type.
• Corrections. Every word you fix by hand costs more than the word took to say.
• Waiting. The gap between the end of your speech and the text appearing is part of the total.
• Restarts. Apple Dictation stops automatically when no speech is detected for 30 seconds, so a long pause means starting again.
• Short tasks. A one-line reply is dominated by the start and stop, so measure longer pieces as well.