Methodology
Voice Capture tells you that spoken survey answers carry about twice as many words as typed ones. This page is the arithmetic behind that sentence: what was counted, over which responses, what came out — and, the part that matters most, what these numbers cannot tell you.
Words per response, voice against typed, in real client surveys. In every study included here both answer modes were live on the same questionnaire: some respondents pressed the microphone button, others typed into the box. We counted the words in each answer and compared the two groups. Nothing is modelled, weighted or extrapolated — these are counts.
693 voice responses and 6,476 typed responses, 7,169 in total, across 7 client studies fielded between March 2026 and August 2026.
Voice answers average 23.1 words against 10.1 typed, a ratio of 2.3×. The median voice answer is 16 words against 8 typed.
We report medians alongside means on purpose. Both groups have long tails — a small number of very long answers pulls the average up — so the mean on its own would overstate the typical case. The median is the answer in the middle, and it is the more honest number for what a respondent usually says or writes.
| Metric | Voice | Typed |
|---|---|---|
| Responses (n) | 693 | 6,476 |
| Mean words | 23.1 | 10.1 |
| Median words | 16 | 8 |
| 90th percentile | 48 | 19 |
The claim made on the rest of the site is "2× more words". That is this measurement rounded down, so the published number can never be larger than what was measured.
The comparison above pools every question together, so we also ran it question by question. Across 9 question cells with at least ten responses in each group — 606 voice and 5,463 typed responses — the median ratio is 2.0× and the mean ratio 2.06×, ranging from 1.42× to 2.60×.
This is the check that matters: comparing voice against typed within the same question rules out the ratio being an artifact of different studies asking different questions, rather than of how the answer was given.
Voice Capture cannot measure skip or abandonment rates. It only records answers that happened: there is no record of a respondent who saw a question and did not answer it, so the denominator a skip rate needs does not exist in our data at all. That denominator lives in your survey platform.
This site previously claimed "40% fewer skips" and attributed it to our own data. No such measurement ever existed. The claim has been removed rather than restated with a smaller number.
We also make no claim here about the quality of what was said — only about how much of it there is. More words is more material to code and analyse; it is not automatically a better answer.
And this describes our clients’ fieldwork, not a controlled experiment. Respondents chose which mode to use; nobody was assigned to one.
Two kinds of responses are left out, under a rule written down before the figures were read:
Both rules, and the list of included studies, live in the source file these figures come from, so a re-measurement reproduces the same population instead of a new one.
The claim this replaces had no source anywhere in our code, our data or our documents. It survived for months because nothing tied it to a measurement. Every number on this page is rendered from the single module that holds the measurement, and so is every number in the site copy that cites it. A figure cannot be edited inside a sentence without changing the evidence, and it cannot change in the evidence without changing the sentence.
Add the microphone to one open-ended question in your next study and compare the two columns yourself.
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