Speaking time calculator

How to use it

1. 1

   Paste the script

   Only the words you will say. Write a heading as # Opening or [Opening] above each part and the timeline splits there; with no headings it splits on paragraphs.

2. 2

   Pick how you will deliver it

   Six rates, each one somebody measured rather than guessed. Presenting to a room is the safe default, and the note under the picker says where the number comes from.

3. 3

   Put your slot in

   Type the time you have, as 5:00 or 90s or 4m30s. A dashed line lands across the timeline exactly where your slot runs out, so you can see which section falls off the end.

4. 4

   Cut the block that is too tall

   The tool tells you roughly how many words to lose. The timeline tells you where they are, which is usually not where you thought.

5. 5

   Rehearse against the clock

   One button starts a timer that follows you down the rail, marking the section you are on and showing your live words a minute against the pace you planned.

A total hides the problem

Everyone who has overrun knows the feeling of racing the last three slides. That almost never happens because the script was uniformly too long. It happens because one section quietly grew. A single number cannot show you that, which is why this tool draws the script as a column of blocks sized by time: the setup that took four sentences to write and ninety seconds to say is immediately the tallest thing on the page.

Where these rates come from

Toastmasters puts the most effective speaking rate at 120 to 160 words a minute. A corpus study of thirty university lectures measured an average of 150, with individual lectures running anywhere from 58 to 205. ACX tells audiobook narrators to plan on about 9,300 words an hour, which is 155 a minute, and the Audio Publishers Association uses 9,000. Broadcast script timers label 150 conversational and 160 a standard announcer read. Every preset here is one of those published figures rather than a round number somebody liked.

Reading is not the same as talking

One study of temporal characteristics across four speech styles found reading aloud was the fastest and smoothest style measured, with pauses taking about fifteen per cent of the time, while recalling something from memory was the slowest and most broken up, with pauses taking about a third. The direction is the useful part: a script you read runs faster than the same words delivered from notes. If you plan to speak from prompts rather than read, expect the delivery to run longer than the count.

What the pause allowance is for

The rates already contain the ordinary pauses of ordinary speech, because that is how they were measured. What they do not contain is silence you put in on purpose: a beat after a number, the seconds a room needs to read a slide, laughter, a question you take. Those are the allowances in Advanced options, and they are the reason a script that fits exactly on paper still overruns in the room.