How long does an article's audio actually last?

It's one of the first questions you ask before adding audio to a blog: a thousand-word article, how many minutes is that to listen to? The answer does two very concrete jobs. It tells your readers what they're in for when they press play, and it tells you whether a format is too long for listening before you publish it. The good news is that this duration isn't an unknown. It can be worked out, and it can be checked.

The reading rate, first

A synthetic voice reads at a steady rate, and that rate is measurable. In our case, a French voice reads at roughly nineteen characters a second. That isn't a number picked to look tidy: it was recorded on real production, by counting the characters read and the time the reading took. In plain terms, a little over a thousand characters a minute.

Everything else follows from there. A French word runs to about six characters on average, space included. Nineteen characters a second is therefore in the region of a hundred and ninety words a minute: a measured delivery, the pace of a voice that informs without rushing or dragging. That's deliberate. A faster rate would save minutes but tire the ear over a long piece, which is exactly the kind of trade-off we set out in the reading-speed setting, where the pace can in fact be adjusted to suit the listener and the content.

The estimate: rough, but reliable

Start from your article's word count, since that's the figure you have to hand. Divide it by a hundred and ninety, and you have the length in minutes, give or take a handful of seconds. Here's what that gives on common lengths:

• a short post of five hundred words: about three minutes
• a seven-hundred-word article, the size of a typical blog post: about four minutes
• a thousand-word article: about five minutes
• a twenty-five-hundred-word feature: about thirteen minutes

These durations aren't made up for the example: they're the ones our own calculation produces, the same one the tool displays. You can reproduce them on any article: count the words, divide by a hundred and ninety, and compare against what the player reports once the audio is made.

The only duration that really counts

Everything above is an estimate, useful before you commit. But the exact duration, the one to the second, is only known once the audio is produced, because it depends on the text that's actually read: an acronym spelled out, a date expanded in full, an address said word by word all take longer than their written form suggests. That's why what counts is the time shown by the player, not your word count. The player displays it as soon as the file exists, and your reader sees it before even pressing play. The quality of that reading, and therefore how accurate the duration is, comes down to how the tool handles everything that isn't read the way it's written: it's the heart of what we call reading French well.

When an article turns long

There's a threshold past which duration stops being mere information and becomes a subject in its own right. For us it sits at fifteen thousand characters, about thirteen minutes of listening: as you create the audio, the screen flags "Long article" and states the estimated duration before you launch anything. It isn't a block, it's an honest warning. Past a quarter of an hour listened to in one sitting, a listener's attention drifts, however good the voice.

The answer isn't to read faster, it's to break it up. A long feature is better offered in chapters, or preceded by a spoken summary that gives the gist in a minute to anyone who won't listen to the thirteen. We go into both levers in listening to long texts without fatigue. For a very long document, the tool actually offers to split it in two rather than make it a block nobody will finish.

What to take away

The length of an article in audio holds no mystery: about nineteen characters a second, a little under five minutes for a thousand words, and an exact time shown by the player as soon as the file is made. Keep the estimate in mind to calibrate your formats, and rely on the displayed figure for what you promise your readers. The rest is listening comfort, and that's settled by how you break the piece up far more than by the reading rate.

Read next

• Changing the voice of an already-generated audio: what happens, and what it costs
• Reading a list aloud: what a bulleted list becomes to the ear
• Adding an audio version to your Kajabi content