According to the AP, Kimberly Yeo "thumbed 26 words in 43.24 seconds into her phone, beating a world record of 67 seconds for the same words set by a Briton last September." That's about 36.1 words per minute, which is good enough to pass some typing tests -- I remember having to beat 35 wpm in order to qualify as a temp when I was in college.
Of course, champion typists routinely beat 100 wpm. And normal speaking rates are in the range of 150-200 wpm -- some people can speak much faster, but this is not an area where there are any contests that I know about.
The 26 words that Ms. Yeo texted were not especially easy ones:
The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.
(Note that this is 26 words -- the contest sponsor's count -- if you call "razor-toothed" two words and "freshwater" one word.)
By comparison, I just read this passage into the computer, speaking briskly but clearly. With generous segmentation around the edges, the duration of the read passage was 6.97 seconds, or 223.8 wpm. This include a 490-msec. pause between the two sentences.
The passage is a rather dense one, with 46 syllables, for an relatively high average (for English) of 1.78 syllables/word. This makes my speech rate in the passage about 396 syllables/minute, or about 152 msec./syllable, which is about average for material like this.
I don't know what normal, sustained texting rates are -- an informal lunch-room guesstimate in Japan was 15 wpm for skilled users. But of course, rates on clotted formal text like the cited test passage are not relevant, since a typical eight-English-word text message is more like "my summr is cwot" than "the piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus".
Still, texting is clearly slow and effortful compared to talking. Its popularity in Japan and Europe, relative to the U.S., seems to be due to higher prices for voice calls and/or greater constraints on talking in public places.
Posted by Mark Liberman at July 1, 2004 01:16 AMIts popularity in Japan and Europe, relative to the U.S., seems to be due to higher prices for voice calls and/or greater constraints on talking in public places
I don't know about Europe, but isn't texting popularity in Japan also because written language for Japanese is more amenable to texting. Not only the kana (which workout quite nicely for the thumb pad) but also the kanji coupled with stronger and stronger algorithms make it easier and easier to input one or two kana and get the kanji.
Posted by: joe tomei at July 1, 2004 01:29 AMAlso, the use of T9 for western languages tends to encourage spelling (and discourage contractions.) In your example, summr in 3-mode would be 7777886 pause 633777 (so, 13 strokes and a pause) vs. summer in T9 which would be 7866371 (the 1 is the trailing space) (so, 7 strokes and no pause - less than half the time.) It actually takes *more* time to abbreviate for many conventional abbreviations... I haven't done entropy or hamming distance calculations, and it's still horribly slow compared to full keyboard typing, but my sense from using this is that this is generally true.
Posted by: Mark Eichin at July 1, 2004 04:22 PM[And normal speaking rates are in the range of 150-200 wpm -- some people can speak much faster, but this is not an area where there are any contests that I know about.]
Apparently, the Guiness Book of World Records has listed Fran Capo as the world's fastest talking female. I'm not sure if there's a fastest talking male. This page says that she can speak just over 600 words per minute:
http://www.comediansusa.com/imposters/capo_fran.html
Web pages seem to agree on that figure.
I saw a TV show featuring her several months ago. They did several tests, most of which I don't remember (I don't think I was paying close attention). However, I do remember that they slowed down a recording of her speaking and she *was* pronouncing the words fairly clearly. It wasn't her record, but the show said that it wasn't significantly below it.
Posted by: Chainik at July 8, 2004 08:59 AM