🎙️ Word Meter
One button. Counts every word spoken around you. Lives entirely in your browser.
About
Word Meter uses the browser’s built-in Web Speech API (SpeechRecognition) to listen to your microphone and count the words it hears. There is no server, no upload from this page, no account, and no cost.
- 🟢 Tap Start counting and grant microphone access
- 🔢 The big number is the total words spoken since you started
- ⏱️ See your words-per-minute over the last 1 minute, last 10 minutes, and overall
- 💬 The captions panel shows the last 30 seconds of recognized speech, fading as it ages
- 🔒 Pick On-device (default) or Cloud recognition - see below
On-device vs. cloud
The page exposes a small Recognition chooser. On-device is the default and asks the browser to keep audio handling local using the standardized processLocally hint. Recent Chromium and Safari can fulfill this request when the language pack is installed; otherwise the browser may fall back, or recognition may fail with a clear message you can act on. Cloud mode lets the browser stream audio to its vendor’s speech service (Google, in Chromium’s case) which usually offers wider language coverage at the cost of privacy.
Browser support
The Web Speech API is supported in Chrome, Edge, and Safari. Firefox does not currently expose SpeechRecognition. The on-device toggle is most meaningful on recent Chromium builds; older browsers ignore the hint and behave as they always have.
Tips
- Speak normally - the recognizer works best with conversational speech
- Use a quiet-ish room for accurate counts; very low or very loud audio can be skipped by the recognizer
- The counter automatically restarts after silence so it can run as ambient background measurement