Speaking vs. Typing: How Much Time Can You Save at Work?
Speaking is about three times faster than typing. What that means for your workweek, where the time actually goes, and how to switch to voice without losing quality.
Most of us spend a large part of the day typing: emails, chat messages, reports, meeting notes and, more and more, prompts for AI tools. Typing feels normal because we've always done it – but it's also one of the slowest steps in getting work done.
How much faster is speaking?
An average person types somewhere around 40 words per minute on a computer. Conversational speech runs at roughly 130 to 150 words per minute.
That gap isn't just theory. A study by researchers at Stanford University, the University of Washington and Baidu compared speech recognition with typing on smartphones and found that speech input was about three times faster than typing, for both English and Mandarin – with fewer errors.
What that means for your week
Say you spend two hours of each workday typing. If speaking makes the same output about three times faster, and you keep some time for reading over and editing, you can realistically save around 60% of that time:
- 2 hours of typing a day × 5 days = 10 hours a week
- 60% saved = about 6 hours back every week
- Over 46 working weeks, that's around 35 workdays a year
You can try your own numbers with the time-savings calculator on our homepage.
Where the time goes
Typing time is spread across many small tasks, which is why it's easy to underestimate:
- Email. A frequently cited McKinsey study found that knowledge workers spend about 28% of their workweek on email.
- Chat. Slack, Teams and WhatsApp replies are short, but there are dozens of them every day.
- Documents. Reports, proposals and notes – where a blank page often costs more time than the writing itself.
- AI prompts. Good results need context, and context means typing paragraphs.
Doesn't speaking produce worse text?
It used to. Early dictation software needed training, made many mistakes and produced a wall of text without punctuation. Modern speech recognition is different:
- punctuation and capitalisation are added automatically;
- filler words like "um" and "uh" can be removed automatically;
- custom vocabulary keeps names and technical terms correct;
- AI can reshape spoken notes into a structured email or translate them.
The result reads like something you wrote – it just took a fraction of the time.
How to make the switch
- Start with one task. Email or chat replies are the easiest place to begin.
- Draft by voice, edit by keyboard. Speak the first version without stopping, then polish.
- Use one tool everywhere. Switching between different dictation features in every app kills the habit. A system-wide hotkey keeps it simple.
- Give it a week. Speaking your text feels odd for a day or two, then it becomes the obvious way to write.
VoiceTyp works in every app on Mac and Windows with one hotkey, in more than 70 languages, and has a free plan with 60 minutes every month – enough to measure the difference on your own work.