My result says my pace is 'a bit fast' — what does that mean?

It means something specific: your pauses between words are consistently shorter than the gap a listener expects at that point in the sentence, and the measurement is about where you're rushing, not just how fast you're talking overall.

30-second version: sayit measures the actual silence between every pair of adjacent words and compares it to an ideal gap that depends on what comes before it — roughly 0.06 seconds mid-phrase, 0.25 seconds after a comma, 0.45 seconds after a full stop. If your gap is shorter than that ideal by more than a small tolerance, that specific transition is marked "rushed." "A bit fast" as an overall verdict usually means several of those transitions were rushed, most often the ones after punctuation, which is the exact spot listeners rely on for a beat to process what you just said.

Why overall WPM isn't the whole story

It's tempting to think pace is just words-per-minute — talk slower, problem solved. But two speakers with the same overall WPM can sound completely different: one who pauses properly at commas and periods and speeds through the words in between sounds natural and confident; one who talks at a flat, unvarying rate right through every punctuation mark sounds rushed even at a moderate WPM, because the pauses that signal sentence structure never show up. sayit reports both a target words-per-minute (130, a comfortable coached rate) and an articulation rate that excludes pause time, precisely because "fast" can mean either "your words come out fast" or "you're not pausing where a listener expects a pause" — and those need different fixes.

Where "rushed" actually gets flagged

Every word-to-word transition gets its own ideal gap based on the punctuation immediately before it — none for a mid-phrase transition, a bit more after a comma or semicolon, more still after a sentence-ending period, question mark, or exclamation point. If your actual gap comes in meaningfully shorter than that ideal, that transition gets tagged rushed; meaningfully longer, and it gets tagged dragging; within tolerance, it's marked good. Whisper-detected word overlap — where the next word's audio starts before the last one's ends — gets flagged as a forced strong "rushed," because that's the clearest possible sign of no pause at all.

This means "a bit fast" as a headline usually traces back to a handful of specific transitions, not an even rush across the whole recording — and the per-transition detail is exactly where the fix should target.

What the fix looks like

Don't try to slow your words down generally — that often just stretches syllables awkwardly without fixing the actual issue. Instead, target the punctuation: put a real, deliberate half-beat pause after every comma, and a full beat after every period, even if it feels exaggerated at first. The words themselves can stay at a natural pace; it's the gaps around punctuation that carry most of the signal.

A useful mental model: read the punctuation marks in your head as if they were tiny stage directions — comma means "brief breath," period means "full stop, let it land" — rather than treating them as invisible.

Drill it

Record: "I asked him to pick it up last night." No internal punctuation — a clean test of whether your baseline mid-phrase pace is even, before punctuation enters the picture.

Record: "What did you do at the end of the day?" A single question mark at the end — check whether your final transition actually slows down or rushes straight through it.

How do I know it's improving?

Watch the count and location of rushed transitions across takes, not just the headline tempo score — a score that improves because you slowed down everywhere isn't the same fix as one where specifically the comma and period transitions stopped being rushed. The second is the durable fix; the first often reverts under any pressure to speak faster, like an exam or a real conversation.

Try it

Open sayit free — no install, no card — and record a sentence with at least one comma and one period. Check which specific transitions get flagged rather than only the headline pace verdict.