How long is 1000 characters of speech?
About seventy seconds. A thousand characters of ordinary written English, read at the pace a narrator actually uses rather than the pace of conversation, comes out at roughly a minute and ten seconds of audio. That figure is stable enough to plan a script around, and knowing it is useful mostly because voice tools bill in characters while video editors think in seconds.
The short answer, and the arithmetic behind it
Narration sits around 14 characters of text per second of audio. That gives roughly 840 characters a minute, so a thousand characters lands at about 72 seconds. In words, it is about 145 to 150 words a minute, which is the standard pace for explainer and documentary reads — slower than the 160 to 180 of normal conversation, because narration is written to be understood the first time. The number moves with the writing: long technical words, numbers read aloud, and heavy punctuation all stretch it, while short declarative sentences pull it in.
Converting between characters, words and seconds
A few conversions worth keeping. An English word averages about 5.8 characters once you count the space after it, so 1000 characters is roughly 170 words. Thirty seconds of narration is about 420 characters, or 70 to 75 words — which is why a 30-second advert script is so short. A single minute is about 840 characters. And a typical paragraph of web prose, four or five sentences, runs 400 to 600 characters, so it reads as 30 to 45 seconds of audio. If you have ever written what felt like a short paragraph and found it ran a minute, that is the reason.
Why tools count characters and not words
Speech systems work on characters because that is what they actually process, and because it is the only unit that is unambiguous. A word count has to decide what a hyphenated compound is, what a number is, what a URL is. A character count does not, so billing and limits are both expressed that way. The practical consequence is that the cost of a clip scales with the length of your text rather than with the effort of reading it, and that you should count characters rather than words when checking whether a script fits — most word processors show both, and any text editor will tell you.
Fitting a script to one clip
A clip here holds up to 1000 characters, which is about 72 seconds — the length of an intro, a product explainer, a trailer read, or a section of a longer narration. If your script is over, you have two options. Trim it: read it aloud and cut the throat-clearing at the start, which is usually the first sentence and a half. Or split it at a natural pause and make two clips, then butt them together in your editor, where the small breath of silence between them tends to sound intentional. The studio shows you the character count and the resulting length as you type, so you find out before you spend anything rather than after.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters is 60 seconds of narration?
About 840, or roughly 145 words. If you are writing to a strict 60-second slot, aim for 800 characters and leave yourself room — scripts almost always run longer read aloud than they look on the page.
Does the speed setting change how much I can fit?
It changes the duration of the audio, not the character limit. The limit is on the text, so a faster read gives you the same 1000 characters in less time rather than letting you use more.
Do spaces and punctuation count?
Yes. Every character in the box counts, including spaces, commas and line breaks, because the system processes all of them — punctuation is a large part of how the pacing comes out right.
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