Typical speaking rates
| Kind of voiceover | Words a minute | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Ads and promos | 160 to 180 | Energy, and a fixed slot to fill |
| YouTube and social video | 150 to 170 | Conversational, with momentum |
| Explainers and product demos | 140 to 160 | Clear, with room to look at the screen |
| Audiobooks and documentaries | 140 to 160 | Comfortable for long listening |
| E-learning and instructions | 120 to 150 | Time to take things in |
| Meditation and sleep stories | 90 to 120 | Slow, with long pauses |
Word budgets for common lengths
| Length | At 150 words a minute | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 15 seconds | about 35 to 40 words | A short ad or a pre-roll |
| 30 seconds | about 75 words | A standard ad, a channel intro |
| 60 seconds | about 150 words | A short-form video, a promo |
| 2 minutes | about 300 words | An explainer |
| 5 minutes | about 750 words | A course lesson, a tutorial |
| 1 hour | about 9,000 words | An audiobook hour, a long documentary |
Running-time calculator
Paste a script to see its running time.
It runs in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere. Speaker names before a colon aren't counted. Chinese and Japanese are counted in characters, at about 280 a minute.
Your voice has its own pace
A cloned voice speaks at the pace of the sample it was made from, so these figures are a starting point. For an exact number, generate one paragraph of about 100 words, time it, and work out that voice's words per minute. To change the pace itself, see pacing and pauses.
Other languages run longer, or shorter
The same message takes a different number of words, and seconds, in each language. Translations from English into Spanish, French or German often come out noticeably longer, which matters when the audio has to fit a fixed slot or a video cut. Budget extra time, or ask translators for a shorter version. See localizing video.
Leave room for silence
Running time isn't only words. Pauses between lines, music stings, on-screen moments and breaths all add up. For a fixed slot such as a 30-second ad, aim for about 10 percent fewer words than the budget, and set the gaps between lines yourself in the edit: each line in abcVoiceover is its own audio file, so the spacing is yours.