Free tool · runs in your browser · updated 2026-09-06

Speech time calculator — for a script in English, or one you wrote in Chinese.

Paste your script and this page tells you how long it takes to say out loud. Seven hundred and fifty words at 130 words per minute is 5 minutes 46 seconds. Move the pace slider to match how you actually speak — or press Start, read your own script aloud, press Stop, and the page replaces the guess with your measured rate. It also handles a script written in Chinese and delivered in English. Characters and words are not interchangeable: across 1,052 sentence pairs from real bilingual meetings we measured 1.43 Chinese characters per English word, so 300 Chinese characters is roughly 210 English words, about 1 minute 37 seconds at 130 wpm. The page counts characters and words separately and converts before it estimates. Everything runs in your browser: nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, there is no sign-up.

Your script

Pace · 130 wpm

Or measure your own

Press Start, read the script above out loud, press Stop. The slider moves to the rate you actually spoke at.

Speaking time

0:00

English words

0

counted directly

Chinese characters

0

converted at 1.43 per word

The text stays in this tab. No upload, no account, no analytics on what you paste.

Measure your pace instead of picking a label

Every other speech calculator asks you to choose between “slow”, “average” and “fast”, then does arithmetic on a number you guessed. The guess is the largest source of error in the result: 100 wpm and 170 wpm differ by 70% on the same script.

So this page has a stopwatch. Paste the script, press Start reading, read it out loud the way you will actually deliver it, press Stop. The page divides your words by your seconds and moves the slider there. Read a different passage — a nervous one, a technical one, one in your second language — and you get a different number, which is the point: your pace is a property of you and the material, not of a dropdown.

A useful habit: measure once on the introduction, once on the most technical paragraph, and plan with the slower of the two.

Where the 1.43 comes from

If you write in Chinese and speak in English, a character count tells you nothing about how long you will talk. We had a way to measure the gap: Voice Translator (formerly Meeting Translator) keeps a bilingual transcript of every meeting it captions, so each row is the same sentence in both languages.

Across the archive on this machine, 1,052 aligned sentence pairs from real meetings (mock and test sessions excluded) contain 8,235 English words against 11,784 Chinese characters — 1.43 characters per word. The median sentence lands at 1.44; the tenth percentile at 1.00 and the ninetieth at 2.00, so a single short sentence can miss badly while a page of text lands close.

Two honest caveats. This is spoken meeting language — numbers, product names, half-sentences — not written prose, and a formal script may compress differently. And it is one archive on one machine, not a corpus study. It is published because it is measured, and because no speech calculator we could find publishes any figure for this at all.

Method and the rest of our first-party numbers: measured latency and accuracy.

What this number does not include

Pauses. Slide changes. Questions. The three seconds you spend deciding whether to say “leverage”. Anything that is not a word in the box is not in the estimate, and in a talk given in a second language those gaps are often the larger half of the clock.

It also does not judge the script. If you are preparing to explain something to someone who does not share your language, the harder problem is not the length — it is that they cannot interrupt you in your language. That is what Voice Translator's Present posture is for: you talk, a board draws the structure, and they read it on their own phone in their own language and push back on a specific card.

Questions people actually ask

How long is a 5 minute speech in words?+

At 130 words per minute — an ordinary conversational pace — five minutes is about 650 words. At 150 wpm it is about 750, at 100 wpm about 500. The spread between those is more than a page of text, which is why this page would rather measure you than average you: press Start, read a paragraph of your own script aloud, press Stop, and the estimate uses the rate you just spoke at.

I wrote the script in Chinese but I have to deliver it in English. How long will it run?+

Paste the Chinese text and the page converts before it estimates. The conversion factor is 1.43 Chinese characters per English word, measured across 1,052 aligned sentence pairs from real bilingual meetings — 8,235 English words against 11,784 Chinese characters. So 300 Chinese characters is roughly 210 English words: about 1 minute 37 seconds at 130 wpm.

Does my script get uploaded?+

No. The counting, the conversion and the timer all run in JavaScript in this tab. There is no server call, no account, and nothing is saved when you close the page. If you paste something confidential, it stays as private as the tab you pasted it into.

My real talk always runs longer than the estimate. Why?+

The estimate covers the words and nothing else. Pauses, a slide that will not advance, a question from the room, the second you take to find the next sentence in a language that is not your first — none of that is in the word count. Time those separately and add them; for a talk you will give in a second language, the pauses are usually the larger half.