Can you type faster than you talk?

For most people, no. Speech outruns typing on both the keyboard and the phone. An online test of 136 million keystrokes found that the average participant typed about 52 words per minute ¹. On a phone the average is lower, about 36 words per minute ². People speak at about 125 to 150 words per minute ³.

The comparison is easy to misread, because the numbers come from different tests. The sections below separate the typing averages, the speaking rates and the controlled comparison, then explain where the answer changes.

Most people type more slowly than they speak

The typing averages come from people who chose to take a test. The keyboard figure is from a large online test, and the phone figure is from an online study of 37,370 volunteers ². Frequent typists are more likely to take a typing test, so these averages probably run higher than the typing of the whole population. They are useful for comparison, not as a national norm.

Speaking is faster on the same scale. The conversational rate in recorded telephone calls averaged 196 words per minute, counting every pause ⁴. That figure includes silence, so it understates how fast a person talks while talking. It still shows that ordinary speech outruns ordinary typing by a wide margin.

In a controlled phone study, speech entered text about three times faster

The clearest comparison put both methods on the same device. In a 2018 study from Stanford University and the University of Washington, participants entered short English messages on an iPhone. Speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 words per minute on the built-in keyboard ⁵, which makes speech 2.93 times faster ⁶. The count included the time spent fixing mistakes, so the result is not just the speed of a first attempt.

The same study found a trade-off in accuracy. Speech made fewer errors while entering text, but it left more of them in the final version. The corrected error rate during entry was 5.30 percent for speech and 11.22 percent for typing. In the submitted text, speech left 1.30 percent uncorrected errors, against 0.79 percent for typing ⁷. Speech is faster, and typing gives you the cleaner final text unless you proofread the dictation carefully.

The answer changes with the typist, the device and the room

The controlled comparison used a phone, and phone typing averages were lower than keyboard averages in the tests above, so the speech advantage on a computer keyboard may differ. A fast keyboard typist starts from a higher base, so the advantage of speech is probably smaller for them. We found no controlled study that tests whether the speech advantage holds for the fastest typists, so a skilled touch typist should measure it rather than assume it.

Noise and accuracy also change the result. A recognizer that makes fewer errors in a quiet room needs less correction, and the speed advantage holds better when you do not have to fix much. The study's short phrases were read in a quiet room, which is why its figures are a best case for speech.

Typing wins for some work. Fixing one word by speaking often means dictating the correction again, and the spoken correction can be misrecognized too ⁸. For a single-word change, a cursor and a keyboard are usually quicker. Code and symbols are another case. We found no timed study of dictating source code, so this is our judgment, not a measured result. Court reporters who write on a stenotype are the exception to the rule, because they use a different keyboard entirely.

What to do with the answer

1. Dictate first drafts, notes and messages, where you can correct the text afterwards and the speed matters most.
2. Type edits, code, formulas and figures, where one wrong character costs more than the time saved by speaking.
3. Measure your own speeds with the same passage on both methods, using the steps in how to test your voice typing speed.

For the speed of dictation alone, see how many words per minute you can dictate. For the broader comparison, read is dictation faster than typing? and the guide on speaking vs typing speed. The typing speed overview covers the keyboard side in more depth, and the entry on words per minute explains how the rate is counted.