The headline number is easy: the average person types around 40 words a minute and speaks around 150. So dictation is roughly three and a half times faster. But most people don’t feel that when they first try it, so it’s worth looking at where the time actually goes.
The words you write in a day
A rough count for someone whose job is mostly communication (founder, PM, consultant, anyone in a Slack-heavy company):
- 30 to 50 Slack or Teams messages, averaging 25 words: about 1,000 words
- 10 to 15 emails, averaging 80 words: about 1,000 words
- Prompts and replies to AI tools: anywhere from 500 to 3,000 words depending on how you work
- Notes, docs, comments: another 500 to 1,000
Call it 3,000 to 6,000 words on an ordinary day. At 40 words a minute that’s 75 minutes to 2.5 hours of typing. At 150 words a minute it’s 20 to 40 minutes.
That’s the theoretical saving: an hour or more a day. In practice you get part of it, for three reasons.
Where the saving shrinks
Thinking time doesn’t change. Some of your typing time is actually deciding what to say. Dictation doesn’t speed that up. It does remove the friction between deciding and having it on the screen, which matters more than it sounds.
Cleanup eats the gain. If your dictation tool gives you a literal transcript, you spend the time you saved fixing ums and adding punctuation. This is why built-in dictation never sticks for most people. The tool has to hand you finished text.
Short messages are a wash. “Yes” and “on it” are as fast to type. Dictation wins on anything over a sentence.
Where the saving grows
Prompts. This is the surprise. When you type a prompt you compress it, get a mediocre answer, and spend two more turns clarifying. When you talk you naturally include the context and the constraints, and a tool that structures that into a proper prompt gets you a good answer first time. The saving isn’t the typing, it’s the follow-ups you don’t need.
Anything you’ve been avoiding. The email you’ve had open for two days. Talking it through takes ninety seconds and it’s done.
Your hands. If you get RSI or just fatigue by the afternoon, this isn’t a productivity gain, it’s the difference between working and not.
A realistic number
Take the theoretical hour, halve it for thinking time and short messages, and add back the follow-ups you skip on prompts. For someone who writes a lot, 30 to 60 minutes a day is a fair expectation. For someone who dictates a few emails, ten.
Speaky Box’s home tab tracks your own words dictated and the time saved against typing at 40 words a minute, so try it for a week on the free plan and look at your number rather than ours.