Slow and clear, 120
Plan with this one when there's a hard limit. Real speeches stop for a laugh, a raised glass or a slide that won't move, and the calculator only counts words.
Speech time calculator
Paste in your speech, or just the word count, and you'll know how long it runs. A 5-minute speech is about 750 words at a talking pace of 150 words a minute. With a hard limit, plan on 600 words, which is 5 minutes at a slow, clear 120. Or read a passage out loud to time it at your pace.
Words per minute
How many words fit in your time.
Find your time limit in the first column. Each column after it is one of the three paces.
| Speech length | Slow and clear120 words a minute | Talking150 words a minute | Reading aloud180 words a minute |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 minute | 120 words | 150 words | 180 words |
| 2 minutes | 240 words | 300 words | 360 words |
| 3 minutes | 360 words | 450 words | 540 words |
| 5 minutes | 600 words | 750 words | 900 words |
| 10 minutes | 1,200 words | 1,500 words | 1,800 words |
| 15 minutes | 1,800 words | 2,250 words | 2,700 words |
| 20 minutes | 2,400 words | 3,000 words | 3,600 words |
Reading your result
Which pace to plan with.
Talking, 150
For a talk you know well and say like a conversation. It's about the average for American English speakers.
Reading aloud, 180
Only if you'll read straight from the page without stopping. It's about how fast adults read out loud. For most speeches that's on the fast side, since people speak a little slower in a presentation than in a conversation.
Or use your own pace. Pick Your pace, press Start reading, and read the passage the way you'll give the speech. The time updates to the pace you read at. On average, people read out loud faster than they talk, so if you'll speak from notes instead of reading, your speech can run longer than the time shown. With a hard limit, check the slow pace too, and leave room for laughs.
A worked example
The two-minute toast.
The example in the calculator is a best man's toast of 178 words. The couple asked for two minutes at most.
Spoken like a conversation, it takes 1 minute 11 seconds. Read straight through, 59 seconds. The number to plan with is the slow one: 1 minute 29 seconds at 120 words a minute. Two minutes at that pace fits 240 words, so he could add about 60 more. That's one more short story about Sam, not three.
Then Jordan, the best man, reads the passage out loud and gets 138 words a minute. At that pace the toast takes 1 minute 17 seconds. He'd rather keep those 43 seconds for laughs than add the story, so the toast stays as it is.
How it works
Words, divided by your pace.
The word count. A word is anything between spaces that has a letter or a number in it. "Well-known" is one word, and a dash on its own is none. A year like 2026 counts as one word, even though you'll say two, so a speech full of numbers runs a little long.
The time is the number of words divided by the words per minute, rounded to the nearest second.
Talking, 150, is the average rate of speech for English speakers in the United States, from the National Center for Voice and Speech.
Slow and clear, 120, is the slowest of the clear speaking samples in Baruch College's guide to speaking rate. The same guide suggests about 140 when you want to be easy to follow.
Reading aloud, 180, rounds the 183 words a minute that Marc Brysbaert found across 77 studies of adults reading out loud, in his 2019 review in the Journal of Memory and Language.
Your pace is the passage's 104 words divided by the time between Start and Done, times 60. If the result is under 60 or over 300 words a minute, something went wrong, so the page asks you to try again.
From blank page to timed speech
Talk it out, then time it.
1. Say it in any order
Go for a walk and talk through what you want to say. The AudioPen app records it on your phone, your computer or the web.
2. Get a clear draft
AudioPen turns what you said into a draft in the style you pick, ready to edit. How writers use it for first drafts.
3. Time it, then practice
Paste the draft into the calculator above. Then say it out loud with the free online voice recorder and play it back.
Questions
Everything you might want to know
Straight answers to the questions people ask before they start.