Fact · Typing and writing speed
17percent
In conversational telephone speech, about 17 percent of elapsed time carries no speech, by the difference between the overall and net rates.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
- What it measures
- The 196 and 236 rates come from the same corpus of conversational telephone speech, so their ratio measures pauses and noise within that corpus only.
- How it is calculated
- 1 - 196 / 236 = 0.17, so 17 percent of elapsed time is silence or non-speech noise