The study also found that enabling the auto-correct of words offers aВ clear benefit, whereas word prediction, or manually choosing word suggestions, does not. Over 74% of people type with two thumbs, and the speed increase it offers is very large. The best predictor of performance is whether you use one finger or two thumbs to type. Anna Feit explains: вЂњSuch large amount of experience transfers to the development of typing skill and explains why young people, who spend more time with social media, communicating with each other, are picking up higher speeds.вЂќ On average, the participants reported spending about 6 hours per day on their mobile device.

While the majority of volunteers were women in their early twenties and about half of the participants came from U.S., the dataset includes people from all ages and from over 160 countries. The dataset is unique in its size and made publicly available. With the consent of the participants, they recorded the keystrokes they made while transcribing a set of given sentences to assess their typing speed, errors and other factors related to their typing behaviour on mobile devices. The research team collected a dataset from over 37,000 volunteers in an online typing test, with the help of the typing speed test service. The fastest speed the researchers saw on a touchscreen was a user who managed the remarkable speed of 85 words per minute. Most people achieve between 35-65 WPMвЂќ The authors call the difference between typing on a keyboard and a smartphone вЂњthe typing gapвЂќ and predict that as people get less skilled with physical keyboards, and smart methods for keyboards improve further (such as auto-correction and touch models), the gap may be closed at some point. вЂњWe were amazed to see that users typing with two thumbs achieved 38 words per minute on average, which is only about 25% slower than the typing speeds we observed in a similar large-scale study of physical keyboards.вЂќ Said Anna Feit, a researcher at ETH ZГјrich, and one of the co-authors, вЂњWhile one can type much faster on a physical keyboard, up to 100 wpm, the proportion of people who actually reach that is decreasing. Their main finding is that typing speeds on smartphones are now catching up with physical keyboards. Researchers from Aalto University, University of Cambridge and ETH ZГјrich analysed the typing speed of tens of thousands of users on both phones and computers. Keep that in mind, and be patient if you want to get used to dictation.The largest experiment to date on mobile typing sheds new light on average performance of touchscreen typing and factors impacting the text input speed. Streaming your thoughts in real-time requires practice. Staying in a public environment? You might want to think about privacy issues before you start talking, too.ДЇeel comfortable enough thinking and speaking your thoughts in the target language, especially if it is not your native language. Keep in mind that speech-to-text engines now do a better job of separating your voice from the background, so just give it a try and see whether the environment youвЂ™re in is dictation-friendly or not. Otherwise, additional vocal noises might get in your way and interrupt both your ability to focus and the machineвЂ™s ability to understand what youвЂ™re saying. Stay in a proper environment with low background noise. The distinction is between dictation and creation. However, if you have your thoughts all clear and ready to go, a simple dictation session can improve typing speed and work like magic. вЂњ Delete that, move two words back, add an apostrophe, go one word forward, replace it.вЂ™ These donвЂ™t sound like fun and are obviously slower than just using your keyboard. If you go back and forth editing during the process, using dictation might be challenging. Have a clear understanding of the content you want to create.

Average typing speed