Speaking is about four times faster than typing. And it is not a question of practice: however much better you get at typing, you will still speak faster than you write, because you have been doing it all your life.
The sums, with concrete numbers
A fluent person types at around 40 words a minute when drafting (not copying, which is faster, but thinking and writing at the same time). Speaking, a comfortable and perfectly understandable pace is around 160.
These are round figures, and the published studies point the same way. In the largest study on typing carried out so far (Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, 2018), 168,000 people copying sentences on a computer keyboard averaged 52 words a minute; drafting is slower, because you are thinking at the same time. And in an experiment by Stanford University and the University of Washington (2017), entering short messages in English by voice on a phone was 2.93 times faster than typing them: 153 words a minute against 52.
| Document | Words | Typing | Dictating | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long email | 300 | 7 to 8 min | ~2 min | +5 min |
| Case note | 800 | 20 min | 5 min | +15 min |
| Brief | 2,000 | 50 min | 12 to 13 min | +37 min |
| Long report | 5,000 | 2 h 5 min | ~31 min | +1 h 34 min |
A 2,000-word brief goes from about fifty minutes to just over twelve. And this is only the draft: in both cases you still have to reread, adjust and finish it off. What changes is not that the document writes itself, but the starting point from which you begin to review.
Why the real effect is bigger than the table
The arithmetic falls short for two reasons that don't appear in any column.
The blank page weighs less
Starting a document is hard. Typing, the first sentence gets written, deleted and rewritten three times. Speaking, starting is much cheaper: you get the whole idea out even if it comes out imperfect, and then you polish it. A text that already exists is corrected much faster than one is produced from scratch.
Work builds up differently
Half an hour saved on a brief is half an hour. But when every email, every note and every report of the day comes out four times sooner, what changes is not one task: it is the whole queue. Documents stop piling up for the end of the day, and that is the difference between finishing at seven or at nine.
Translated into money: if an hour of your work is worth more than the tool's monthly fee (and for almost any professional it is), getting back a single hour a month already pays for it. With the numbers above, you get that hour back by dictating three or four briefs.
Where the advantage is lost
Here is the small print, and it is the part almost nobody mentions: the 4x advantage only exists if the text comes out usable. If dictation gives you back a paragraph with no punctuation, with five proper names misspelt and with every «eh» and «o sea» (um, I mean) transcribed literally, correcting eats up what you gained and you end up taking as long as typing. With more discomfort.
That is why three details that look minor decide the whole result:
- Automatic punctuation. If you have to keep saying «coma», «punto y aparte» (comma, new paragraph), you don't just lose time: you lose the thread of what you were reasoning, which is the expensive part.
- Cleaning out filler words. The difference between transcribing how you spoke and writing what you meant to say.
- Custom vocabulary. The surnames, acronyms and companies you use every week. If it doesn't learn them, you drag the same corrections through every document, for ever.
This is exactly where the dictation tools that come pre-installed fall short, as we explain in how to dictate in Word.
Put another way: the metric that matters is not how many words a minute it transcribes, but how much is left to fix when you let go of the microphone.
ablalo recognises Spanish speech, punctuates automatically, removes filler words and learns the terms you add, so the draft comes out ready to review rather than to rewrite. It works with a single shortcut in any program on Windows and Mac, and your voice is transcribed on your own computer.
There is also a reason that has nothing to do with time: taking keystrokes out of your working day. What the official guides say about the keyboard, the wrists and breaks, we cover in tendinitis from typing on a computer.
In short
Dictating is four times faster than typing, and over a working day that ratio translates into hours, not minutes. But the advantage doesn't come from the microphone: it comes from how little you have to correct afterwards. That is where it is decided whether you really finish sooner or just move the effort somewhere else.
Sources: Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes (CHI 2018, Aalto University and University of Cambridge); Ruan, Wobbrock, Liou, Ng and Landay, Comparing Speech and Keyboard Text Entry for Short Messages in Two Languages on Touchscreen Phones (2017). Checked on 12 October 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How much faster is dictating than typing?
A person types at about 40 words a minute and speaks fluently at about 160, so dictating is in the order of four times faster. The real advantage depends on how much has to be corrected afterwards: if the dictation doesn't punctuate on its own or recognise your vocabulary, a good part of that margin is lost in the review.
How long does it take to draft a 2,000-word brief?
At 40 words a minute it is about 50 minutes of typing to get to the draft. Dictating at 160 words a minute, the same draft comes out in about 12 or 13 minutes. In both cases the review of the text is still to come.