Sources for our numbers

Speaking vs. typing: about 3× faster

Ruan et al., 2017 (PACM IMWUT, peer-reviewed; Stanford University and others): on smartphones, speech input was 2.93× faster than the keyboard for English and 2.87× faster for Mandarin Chinese, when copying short messages. An earlier preprint (2016) reported 3.0× and 2.8×.

Other languages: no multiplier

On our pages in other languages we do not state a multiplier, because we found no study in those languages showing about 3×. One recent study in another language fits everyday writing: in Arabic, writing an email on a desktop PC with speech recognition, including corrections, was about 1.4–2.3× faster than keyboard and mouse (Majrashi, 2022, IAJIT; 40 participants). We will add numbers for each language once there is a study that fits, or once we measure it ourselves.