Script timer - teleprompter reading time calculator

What the timer above does

Paste a script into the box, set a speed in words per minute, and it tells you how long the script takes to read aloud at that speed. It counts as you type, so you can cut a paragraph and watch the number move.

The timer does not upload your script and does not keep it. The text sits in the page while you have it open, and it is gone when you close the tab. If the script matters, it lives in your own document, not here.

The number this page gives you is the number the prompter gives you. Both run the same word count and the same arithmetic, out of the same file, so a script that reads 4:37 here takes 4:37 to roll past the reading line at the same speed. There is one estimate, not two that nearly agree.

How the estimate is made

Count the words, divide by words per minute, and that is the answer. No correction factor, no allowance for how hard the sentences look, no rounding up to be safe.

A word is a run of text that starts with a letter or a digit. A line of dots is not a word, and neither is a stray dash, so a script with dashes for pauses does not score longer than the words it actually contains. Hyphenated words and apostrophes stay in one piece, so "self-employed" is one word rather than two.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean are written without spaces between words. Counting whitespace there would score a whole paragraph as one word, and the estimate would come out absurdly short, so it counts those characters one by one and converts them at two characters to the word.

The speed starts at 130 words per minute, which is unhurried but not sleepy, and the range runs from 60 to 240. Those are the same figures the stage uses.

Why words per minute, and not pixels per second

A speed control measured in pixels per second, or in arbitrary units that come to the same thing, describes the screen rather than the reader. Change the text size, the window width or the device, and the same setting reads at a different pace. The number you tuned last week means something else today.

Words per minute is a property of you. Set it to the rate you actually talk at and it stays that rate on a laptop, on a tablet propped beside the lens, and in fullscreen.

That is also what makes this estimate worth having. Because words per minute drives the scroll, the distance the script travels and the time it takes are two sides of the same sum. With a pixels-per-second control, a timer page could only guess at what the prompter would do, and the two numbers would drift apart every time somebody changed the text size.

Why your words per minute is not somebody else's

Most people talk somewhere between 120 and 160 words per minute on camera. That is a wide band, and where you sit in it is not a matter of taste.

• People have a natural pace, and reading against yours is the fastest way to sound like you are reading.
• The material moves it. Numbers, names, product terms, anything legal, anything you have to pronounce carefully: all of it slows you down. Conversational narration runs faster than a specification.
• Delivery is not counted here. A beat after a joke, a breath before the important sentence, a pause while a demo loads: none of that is words.
• People speed up in front of a camera, particularly on the first take. Read your script once at the speed you set before you record.

To find your own number, read a paragraph aloud at the pace you would use on camera and time yourself. Divide the words by the seconds and multiply by 60. Use that number here and on the stage, and both stop being guesses.

Using the number

If you have a slot to fill, work in words rather than in minutes. At 130 words per minute, 600 words runs about 4:37 and 1,000 words runs about 7:42. Write to the length, check the estimate, cut, check again.

When you are over, the reflex is to push the speed up. Resist it. Reading faster than you talk is exactly what makes a delivery sound recited, and the audience hears the difference long before they can name it. Cut a sentence instead. The estimate falls the same amount, and the take sounds better.

If you are under, do not pad. Silence and a slower delivery fill time in a way an extra paragraph does not.

Leave headroom when the limit is hard. An estimate this simple is honest about words and blind to everything else, so a script that comes out one second under a limit is over it in practice.

What it does not know

It counts words, so it cannot see any of the following:

• Pauses you plan and pauses you do not.
• Retakes, restarts, and the sentence you decide to say differently.
• Anything not in the box: an intro clip, a demo, a question from an interviewer.
• How readable the script is out loud. That is a writing problem, and a timer cannot detect it. The blog goes into that.

It is an estimate of the reading, not of the recording. Treat it as the floor.

Voice follow makes it a guide rather than a promise in a different way: it moves the script at the pace you are actually speaking, which is the pace you have rather than the pace you set. Size the script with the estimate and let the reading take the time it takes.

Questions

Is this the same estimate the teleprompter shows? Yes. The two share one piece of code for it. Set the same speed in both places and you get the same time.

Does my script get uploaded? No. It stays in the page, and nothing here saves it either, so it is gone when you close the tab.

What speed should I use? Your own. Most people are between 120 and 160 words per minute on camera. Time yourself reading a paragraph aloud rather than picking a number you like.

How are Chinese, Japanese and Korean counted? By character, converted at two characters to the word, because those languages are not written with spaces between words.

Does it count pauses? No. It counts words. A script with deliberate pauses in it always runs longer than this number.