Speaking vs typing speed: how much faster is dictation?

How fast do people type?

The average person types about 52 words per minute on a physical keyboard. The largest study of typing to date, by Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta (CHI 2018), analyzed 136 million keystrokes from about 168,000 volunteers and found a mean of 51.56 words per minute, with a standard deviation of about 20. The fastest participants passed 120 words per minute, and people with formal typing training were only about 5 words per minute faster than those without.

One caveat: participants chose to take an online typing test, so they may type a little more than average. Typing tests also measure copying text, which is faster than writing your own words.

How fast do people speak?

About 150 words per minute. The National Center for Voice and Speech puts the average speaking rate for American English speakers at about 150 words per minute. That's roughly three times the average typing speed, which is where the popular “dictation is 3× faster” claim comes from.

Is dictation really three times faster than typing?

In a controlled study, yes. Researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington and Baidu (Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay, 2017) compared speech recognition with a phone keyboard for short messages. In English, speech input reached 153 words per minute against 52 for the keyboard, making it 2.93 times faster. Mandarin showed a similar gap: 123 against 43 words per minute.

Accuracy held up too. People made fewer errors while entering text by voice (a corrected error rate of 5.30% against 11.22% on the keyboard), though slightly more mistakes survived into the final text (1.30% against 0.79%). So speech was much faster, and the text needed about the same amount of checking.

Why is the everyday speed-up usually smaller?

The study asked people to enter set phrases, which means no time spent deciding what to say. Real writing is different:

• You pause to think. Composing an email takes thinking time whether you type or talk, so the gap narrows.
• Spoken language is messier. People say “um”, restart sentences and ramble. You either tidy that up by hand or use a tool that does it.
• Recognition errors cost time. Names and jargon are the usual trouble spots, and fixing them eats into your savings.
• Some text is easier to type. Code, passwords and precise formatting are still faster with a keyboard.

That's why cleanup matters as much as raw speed. SayWrite removes filler words, lets you say “new paragraph” or “scratch that”, learns names through a personal dictionary, and can polish a ramble into tidy writing on your Mac.

How can you measure your own speaking vs typing speed?

SayWrite's Stats page measures both on your own Mac, as you work. Speaking speed is the words in each dictation divided by how long you spoke. Typing speed uses the standard typing-test rule of five characters per word, worked out from the timing of your keystrokes in bursts of typing, with a penalty for backspaces. SayWrite counts keystrokes but never records what you type.

The Stats page then shows how many times faster you speak than you type, plus streaks, a daily heatmap and your filler-word habits. It's the most honest answer to “how much faster is dictation?”: your own number, from your own week.

How do you get faster at dictation?

• Think in whole sentences before you start talking, then say them in one go.
• Use a push-to-talk key so you never have to click a button. See how to use the Fn key for dictation.
• Add names and product terms to your dictionary once instead of fixing them every time.
• Let AI cleanup handle the ums and restarts so you don't have to speak perfectly.
• Keep the keyboard for code and short edits; use your voice for anything longer than a sentence.