Read Time

A word count against a published rate gets you close. Speaking rate varies by more than double across the voices on one machine, so this drives the browser’s own speech engine, watches its progress events, and fits the real rate in about two seconds regardless of how long the text is.

Runs entirely in this tab. No network requests, no logging, nothing leaves the page.

Text

Words: 94
Characters: 544
Sentences: 7
Words/sentence: 13.4
Syllables: 134; English heuristic
Reading ease: 73; grade 6.5

Estimate from word count

24s

Delivery

Language

Rate factor 1.00x on the English baseline.

Pause per sentence0 ms

Brysbaert 2019, meta-analysis of 190 studies: mean 238 wpm for English non-fiction, with most readers between 175 and 300.

Measured from a real voice

This browser has no speech synthesis, so there is nothing to measure. The estimate above is all this page can offer here. Chrome, Edge and Safari all support it.

About this tool

01 · Empirical Reading Rates

Replaces folk “200 wpm” rules with Brysbaert (2019) meta-analysis baselines (238 wpm silent, 183 wpm aloud, 130 wpm presentation).

Precision: Independent per-sentence pause modeling.

02 · Zero-Audio Voice Probe

Measures your exact local SpeechSynthesis voice engine. Watches muted word boundary timestamps at normal speed and extrapolates the whole script in under three seconds.

Timing: Wall-clock normalized to fix browser timestamp quirks.

03 · Multilingual & Readability

Applies language-specific pacing factors (German compounding, CJK character ratios) and computes Flesch-Kincaid grade scores on English prose.

Output: Dual estimate & measurement readouts.

Operational Limits & Assumptions

· Boundary Sampling: Extrapolation assumes uniform register; full linear pass is available for mixed text.
· Browser Speech API: Mobile WebKit or restricted engines without boundary events fall back to empirical models.
· Local vs Cloud Voices: Device-local synthetic voices provide zero-latency measurement; cloud voices incorporate network round trips.
· Readability Constraints: Flesch formulas are English-only and intentionally disabled on non-Latin scripts.

Found a case it gets wrong? Tell me about it .