Fact · Typing and writing speed
153words per minute
In a controlled study on an iPhone, English text entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 words per minute on the built-in keyboard, 2.93 times faster.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“the English input rate was 2.93 times faster (153 vs. 52 WPM)”
Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry for Short Messages in Two Languages on Touchscreen Phones, Sherry Ruan et al., Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT), 2018, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3161187)- What it measures
- Participants transcribed short messages on an Apple iPhone 6 Plus in a laboratory, once by speech (Baidu Deep Speech 2) and once with the iOS QWERTY keyboard. The speed counts the finished text, including time spent correcting errors.
- What it does not show
- Short phrases, read rather than composed, in a quiet room. It does not measure long documents, noisy places or the time spent editing a dictated draft afterwards.
Source
Used to calculate
- At the study's 153 words per minute by speech and 52 on the keyboard, a 1,000-word draft takes about 6.5 minutes spoken and 19.2 minutes typed, a saving of about 12.7 minutes.
- At 153 words per minute, 52 words take about 20 seconds to say.
- At 153 words per minute, 60 characters (12 words of five characters) take about 4.7 seconds to speak on a phone.
- When the same text is entered, speech at 153 words per minute takes about two-thirds less time than typing at 52 words per minute. Both rates include correcting errors during entry, so the saving does not include editing the draft afterwards.
- The same 1,200 words of email replies take about 7.8 minutes to speak at 153 words per minute, the English speech rate in the Ruan study.
- At the 52 words per minute that Ruan et al. measured on a phone keyboard, one hour of continuous entry would produce about 3,120 words.
- At the study's speeds, 100 words take about 1.9 minutes to type on the phone keyboard and about 0.65 minutes to speak, so speech saves about 1.3 minutes per 100 words before any editing.
- Ten hours of keyboard writing at 52 words per minute would take about 3.4 hours to enter by speech at 153 words per minute, before editing.
- At 153 words per minute, the English speech rate measured on an iPhone, 1,000 words take about 6.5 minutes to enter by speech.
- English speech input on a phone, at 153 words per minute, is about 2.7 times the 2026 home brain-computer interface average of 56 words per minute.
- Speech input at 153 words per minute is about three times the 51.56 words per minute average from the online typing study. The two studies used different people and settings, so the ratio is a rough comparison.
- At the 153 words per minute that Ruan et al. measured for English speech input on a phone, one hour of continuous dictation would produce about 9,180 words.
- At 52 words per minute on the keyboard and 153 by speech, ten hours of keyboard drafting produce the same words in about 3.4 hours of speaking, before any editing time.
- At 153 words per minute, 1,000 words take about 6.5 minutes to speak into a recognizer, before any editing.
- At the entry speeds in the phone study, typing 1,000 words on the built-in keyboard takes about 12.7 minutes longer than speaking them, before any editing.
- Against the 51.56 words per minute average in the 2018 online keyboard study, 153 words per minute is about 3.0 times as fast. The two studies have different participants and tasks, so this is arithmetic, not a measured comparison.
- If speech runs at 153 words per minute, it is about 4.2 times the 36.2 words per minute average of phone typists in the 2019 online study. The two studies have different participants and tasks, so this is arithmetic, not a measured comparison.
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