How many words per minute can you dictate?

A controlled phone study measured dictation at 153 words per minute, with the time spent on corrections included ¹. That is just above the normal speaking range of 125 to 150 words per minute ². Composing is much slower, because thinking and correcting take time between the words. Your own figure depends on the recognizer and the room.

The sections below give the study numbers for dictating phrases, the historical numbers for composing, and the factors that move your own rate.

Dictated phrases reached 153 words per minute in a controlled study

The best controlled number for dictation comes from a 2018 study on iPhones. Speech reached 153 words per minute, and the count included time spent on corrections ¹. That is just above the 125 to 150 words per minute usually given for normal speaking ². It fits the setting: the participants transcribed short phrases read rather than composed, in a quiet room.

Speaking rates also vary widely. Across recorded telephone conversations, the overall rate of each conversation ranged from 111 to 291 words per minute ³. That spread is between conversations rather than between people, and conversation includes pauses, so it is not a dictation rate.

Composing by voice is much slower than reading aloud

Composing is different from reading. When you find the words as you speak, you pause, rephrase and fix mistakes, and each of those costs time. Early dictation software was far slower at this. Feng and colleagues, citing earlier work, reported that composition with speech software ran at 8 to 15 words per minute ⁴. That is about 5 to 12 percent of normal speaking speed ⁵, a ratio we calculated from the two ranges.

The 8 to 15 figure is reported from earlier work, so it describes older software rather than a limit on modern tools. We found no published study that measures current composing speed by voice. If you need that number for your own work, you will have to measure it.

Your own rate depends on the recognizer and the room

Accuracy decides how much time goes into fixing text, and fixing text takes time that speaking alone does not. On a clean benchmark of read speech, Whisper Large V2 had a word error rate of 2.7 percent ⁶. On the harder CHiME6 test set, the same model reached 25.5 percent ⁷. Those are benchmark numbers, not your results, but they show that accuracy measured on clean speech may not hold in a noisy room. Our guide to dictation in background noise covers the room side in more detail.

Three things can change your number. The first is the recognizer, because some engines make far fewer errors than others. The second is the microphone and how far it sits from your mouth. The third is your own habit: a steady pace with short pauses can produce cleaner text than a fast start that needs heavy editing.

How to find your own number

Count the words in the finished text, and divide by the minutes, including the time spent fixing errors. The simplest test is to dictate a passage you know, time it, then correct it until it matches the original. If you finish a 150-word passage in 2 minutes including fixes, your rate is 75 words per minute. A fast draft that needs heavy editing does not save much time, so the finished text is the number that counts.

For the full set of steps, including how to keep the test fair, see how to test your voice typing speed. If you dictate on a Mac or Windows computer, Yap, which we make, runs its dictation on the device, so your rate also depends on your computer and microphone. You can download it here and run the same test.

For the comparison with typing, read can you type faster than you talk? and the guide on speaking vs typing speed. The entry on words per minute explains how the rate is counted, and the dictation glossary entry covers the terms used here.