Is dictation faster than typing?

Yes, when you measure words entered per minute. In a controlled study on an iPhone, English speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 on the built-in keyboard, about 2.9 times faster ¹. The study counted the finished text, including corrections made during entry, so the advantage is not only a fast first pass. Finished text is what you deliver, though, and the gap may be smaller once you count the time spent fixing dictated text. The full comparison is in the dictation vs typing guide.

Speech wins on raw entry, and it makes fewer errors while drafting

The table shows the phone study's results for short English messages. Speech was faster and made fewer corrected errors during entry, but it left slightly more errors in the final text.

Those leftover errors are the ones an editor must find. Fast drafting does not give clean text without a check. The guide to proofreading dictated text explains how to find them.

Editing time is the part a speed test leaves out

A speed test stops when the words appear on the screen. Working text does not stop there. Vertanen found that, with a large-vocabulary recognizer, correcting errors dominates the task time ³. The phone study used short phrases rather than documents that need proofreading, so it does not measure that cost.

Correcting by speaking again can also fail. Vertanen reported that spoken corrections are often misrecognized themselves, which costs time and patience ⁴. This is why a swapped name or a changed comma is often faster to fix with the keyboard. Words that sound alike, covered by the homophone entry, are one source of these fixes.

Your own typing speed decides how much you save

Speed gains depend on how fast you type now. In a study of 136 million keystrokes from an online typing test, the average participant typed 51.56 words per minute ⁵. Those were self-selected volunteers, so the population average is probably lower. The slower you type, the more time dictation saves per word. A fast typist gains less, because the keyboard time per word is already small.

Your mouth is not the limit. In English and Chinese telephone conversations, speech averaged about 196 words per minute, counting all elapsed time ⁶. Composing is the slow step. Earlier reports of composing with dictation software gave 8 to 15 words per minute ⁷, but those reports used older recognizers, so treat them as a historical floor.

It depends: when dictation is not faster

Dictation can lose its advantage in four cases:

• Dense or technical text, such as code, names and product terms, where the recognizer is more likely to make mistakes and each one needs fixing.
• Heavy editing. If most of your time goes to corrections, the drafting speed you gained is spent again on fixing.
• Quiet or shared rooms. Speaking aloud can disturb colleagues. The dictation and background noise guide covers the room side.
• Precise layout work, such as tables, where a keyboard moves between cells with one key.

The when typing is better than dictation question covers these cases in more detail.

What to do: test with your own writing

The studies above use short phrases, lab recognizers and volunteers. A short test on your own work is more reliable than any general rule:

1. Write one piece twice, once by voice and once by keyboard, on the same topic.
2. Time only the drafting, from the first word to the end of the first version.
3. Time the proofread of each version. This is the step the speed figures leave out.
4. Compare the totals. Use the method with the lower total for that kind of text.

A common approach is to speak the draft and type the fixes. Whether you can type while dictating depends on your device, and the dictation and typing question explains it. If the terms are new to you, the dictation and voice typing entries define them.