How long will your script take to say?
Paste the text or enter a word count. You get the spoken duration at four delivery speeds, the character count the free allowance is measured in, and how many sittings a long script actually takes.
Slow-25%
8 min 5 sec
Natural
6 min 4 sec
Brisk+25%
4 min 51 sec
Fast+50%
4 min 2 sec
What that means here
- Words
- 1,000
- Characters (estimated)
- 5,880
- Free renders needed
- 1
This fits in a single free render — the allowance is 7,000 characters and you would use 84% of it.
Common lengths, at a natural pace
| Length | Spoken duration |
|---|---|
| 100 words | About 36 seconds |
| 250 words — a short intro | About 1 min 30 sec |
| 500 words — a blog post | About 3 minutes |
| 1,000 words | About 6 minutes |
| 1,190 words — one free render | About 7 minutes |
| 2,000 words — a long article | About 12 minutes |
| 5,000 words — a book chapter | About 30 minutes |
| 10,000 words | About 1 hour |
What throws the estimate off
- Numbers and dates. “1994” is four characters and four syllables spoken. A script full of figures runs longer than its length suggests.
- Acronyms. “NASA” is said as a word; “HTTP” is said as four letters. The same four characters, very different durations.
- Pauses you add. Every pause marker adds its full length on top. The studio’s own counter includes them; this page cannot see them.
- Language. These figures are for English. Syllable-timed languages such as Spanish and Japanese carry fewer characters per second of speech.
- The voice itself. Voices differ in natural pace by a few per cent either way, before you touch the speed control.
Questions
- How many minutes is 1,000 words?
- About six minutes at a natural speaking pace. Slower delivery pushes it towards eight; a brisk read brings it under five. Speech pace varies more than people expect, which is why this page shows a range rather than one number.
- Where does the words-per-minute figure come from?
- It is measured, not assumed. One of the site's published example recordings carries the speech engine's own word timings: 52 words spanned 17.95 seconds, or about 174 words per minute. The calculator uses 165, slightly conservative, because an estimate that runs a little long is less annoying than one that promises five minutes and delivers six.
- Why does it show characters as well as words?
- Because the free allowance is counted in characters — 7,000 per render — while people write and think in words. Paste your actual text and the character count is exact; enter a bare word count and it is converted using a measured average of 5.88 characters per word, including spaces.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser: what you paste is counted and discarded. Nothing is transmitted, stored or logged.
- How accurate is this for a real recording?
- Close for ordinary prose. It will read short for text with many numbers, acronyms or long proper nouns, which take longer to say than their length suggests, and it does not count pauses you insert yourself. The studio's own counter adds those in as you write.
- Does the speed setting change the file, or just playback?
- The Speed control before generating bakes the pace into the MP3, which is what these figures reflect. The player also has its own speed toggle, which changes only what you hear and not the file's duration.