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Free Talking Speed Checker: words per minute of your YouTube video

Choose a video or audio file and see how many words per minute you speak, over the full length and while talking, minute by minute. Then compare it with 50 long videos from 25 big YouTube channels, where the median was about 179 words per minute. The speech model runs in your browser: your file never leaves your device.

Updated · Built by Kevin Tabares, long-form YouTube editor at Umbrella Creators.

Measure the talking speed of a video

Your file stays on your device. Nothing is uploaded: your browser decodes the audio and the speech model counts the words right here, in this tab. Only the model is downloaded, once, from Hugging Face.

How to use it

  1. Choose your finished edit or the raw recording (MP4, MOV, WEBM, MP3, WAV or M4A), between 20 seconds and 60 minutes.
  2. Pick the model: Fast (about 64 MB to download) or Better (about 136 MB, more accurate and slower), leave the language on Detect automatically or choose it, and press the button.
  3. The first time, your browser downloads the speech model and keeps it. If you have used my video transcription tool, it is already saved.
  4. Read your words per minute, where it falls next to the 50 big-channel videos, and the minute by minute table. Download it as a CSV if you want to compare several videos.

How fast do big YouTubers talk?

In September 2026 I measured 50 recent long-form videos from 25 large channels (the two most-viewed recent long uploads of each). Counting the words in each video's captions over its full length, the median was about 179 words per minute, and half of the videos fell between 164 and 191. The slowest was a Markiplier gameplay video at about 105, and the fastest an Ali Abdaal video at about 291. The full table, the method and the data are in How loud are YouTube videos? 50 measured.

This checker counts your words the same way, over the full length of your file, so your number lands on the same scale. It also shows the pace while you are talking, without pauses of 0.75 seconds or longer, because a video can sound slow just because of its silences.

FAQ

What is a good talking speed for YouTube?
There is no single right number, but you can compare with what works. In my study of 50 long videos from 25 big YouTube channels, the median was about 179 words per minute, and half of the videos fell between 164 and 191. The slowest was a Markiplier gameplay video at about 105, where long stretches are play without talk; the fastest an Ali Abdaal video at about 291. Education and commentary tend to run faster than gameplay.
How is words per minute measured here?
The speech model writes down every word with the time it was said. "Full length" divides the words by the length of the whole file, which is how I counted the 50 videos in the study, so the two numbers compare directly. "While talking" leaves out every pause of 0.75 seconds or longer, so it shows how fast you speak when you do speak.
Does it upload my video?
No. Your browser decodes the audio and the speech model runs on your own device; the file never leaves this tab. Only the model (Whisper) is downloaded, once, from Hugging Face, and the browser keeps it for next time.
How accurate is the count?
Close enough to compare videos, not to the exact word. Speech models usually skip filler sounds like "um" and can merge or split a few words, and music or several voices at once make them miss more. The Better model makes fewer mistakes. For Chinese, Japanese or Thai, which are not written with spaces between words, the tool stops instead of giving a wrong number.
How do I use the result?
Look at the minute by minute table first. A minute far slower than the rest is usually a long pause, a slow setup or a stretch with no talking, and those are the first places I tighten in an edit. If the whole video is slow, cutting the pauses with the silence detector raises the full-length number without asking you to talk faster.

Who made this

I'm Kevin Tabares. I've edited long-form YouTube videos since 2015 (1,277 videos and 152.2M+ views tracked on YT Jobs) for channels like Rex & Alexa, Puff and Mud. Pace is one of the first things I check in a cut, so I built this to give you the same number in a couple of minutes, without uploading your video anywhere. If you want an editor for your channel, get in touch.

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