The short answer
Normal speed is the narrator’s pace, about 155 words a minute.1 The best speed is the fastest you can follow and enjoy: research on lecture videos finds very little loss of understanding up to about 1.5× and a growing loss at 2× and faster.9,10 At 1.5× an 11-hour book takes 7 hours 20 minutes.
- Normal speed (1×)
- ≈ 155 wpm
- Little loss up to
- ≈ 1.5×
- Matches silent reading
- ≈ 1.6–1.7×
- 1.5× saves
- 33% of the time
How much time each speed saves
Listening time is the book’s length divided by the speed. The saving grows quickly at first and then flattens: going from 1× to 1.5× saves a third of the time, but going from 2× to 3× saves only another sixth.
Listening time
- Speed
- At 1.5× you save 3 h 40 min
How fast is each speed, in words a minute?
ACX puts the average narrator at about 9,300 words an hour, or 155 a minute.1 Multiplying by the speed gives the pace you hear. For comparison, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies found adults read English silently at about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, and aloud at about 183.13
Words a minute
- Playback speed
- Close to average silent reading (fiction)
What research says about faster listening
We found no study of fiction audiobooks at speed. The best evidence comes from lecture videos, which are harder to follow than most audiobooks because they teach new material:
- Murphy and colleagues (2022) found “minimal costs incurred by increasing video speed from 1x to 1.5x, or 2x speed, but performance declined beyond 2x speed”, and noted results may differ with speech rate and difficulty.9
- A 2025 meta-analysis of 24 studies (Tharumalingam and colleagues) found the cost “very small” up to 1.5×, about 2 percentage points on a test averaging 75%, but moderate to large at 2× and above, about 17 points at 2.5×. One study it included found older adults were affected more than younger ones.10,12
- A second 2025 meta-analysis (Huang and colleagues, 12 papers) found faster playback raised learners’ mental effort and lowered test scores, with signs of publication bias in some results.11
How to change the speed in every app
Range: 0.5× to 3.5×, in steps of 0.1 in the cloud player.2
- Open the book in the player and tap the 1.0x Speed button at the bottom left.
- Choose a speed. Audible remembers the speed for that title.
- To change the default for new books: Profile, the Settings gear, Player, Narration Speed, Default. Each device can have its own default.3
With Alexa: “Alexa, read faster”, “read slower” or “read at normal speed”.2
Open the audiobook and tap the speed control (it shows 1x). Google added speed control in 2018 with a range of 0.5× to 3×; we couldn’t confirm the current range on a Google page.14
Our audiobook player plays your own MP3 and M4B files in the browser from 0.5× to 3× in 0.05 steps, keeps chapters and remembers your place and speed for each book. Nothing is uploaded.
To make a file permanently faster, for a car stereo or an old MP3 player without a speed control, the speed changer exports a new file at the speed you choose, with the pitch kept and the chapters moved to match.
Pitch-corrected speed: why voices don’t go squeaky
Playing audio faster by simply speeding up the samples raises the pitch, the familiar chipmunk effect. Pitch-corrected speed (time-stretching) instead shortens the sound while keeping its pitch, so a narrator at 1.5× sounds like the same person speaking briskly. Audible says its apps use “a correcting filter that eliminates the chipmunk voice”;15 Apple, Spotify, Google and Libby don’t describe how theirs work. ffmpeg’s atempo filter, which adjusts “audio tempo”, does the same job,17 and it is what our speed changer uses to make a file permanently faster without changing the voice.
How to get used to faster speeds
- Go up in small steps. 1.1× or 1.2× for a few days, then a little more. A jump straight to 2× sounds rushed; a gradual climb doesn’t.
- Match the speed to the book. A light thriller can go faster than a dense history or a novel with a large cast.
- Match it to the narrator. Some narrators already read quickly; 155 words a minute is only an average.
- Slow down when you drift. If you keep rewinding, the time you saved is gone.