160 Words Per Minute is the Suite Spot for Video Narration. Who Knew?
Dave Weiss · September 21, 2026 · 2 min read
Video Director, the newest application created on the AI Application Manager platform, does a pretty good job of making an application demo video out of the box.
The narration needed a bit of work, so we created an MCP tool for Video Director that downloads the narration event by event as a .md file. Save the file, edit it as you see fit, and use another MCP tool to send it back to Video Director. Video Director creates a new metadata file of what will be in your new version of the video.
The thing that seemed odd (but turned out to be very helpful) was Claude was fixated on how many words per minute were in the narration. It turns out the edits made to the narration made the number of words go down from 633 to 617, generating approximately 227 seconds of voice. The original narration was 234.3 seconds.
The video itself is 3:55. If you convert that to a decimal number, the video is 3.917 minutes. Quick math means at 633 words, the words per minute (WPM) was 161.62. After edits, the WPM went down to 157.53.
Before:
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Source footage | 3:55 (3.917 minutes) |
| Narration audio in words | 633 |
| Narration pace | 161.6 wpm — normal |
After:
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Source footage | 3:55 (3.917 minutes) |
| Narration audio in words | 617 |
| Narration pace | 157.52 wpm — normal |
According to Google, an audio book is about 140 WPM - slower so "readers" can follow the plot. Corporate presentations are usually 150-160 WPM (steady and clear), and advertisements are 180+ higher energy and the need to fit into a :30 or :60 time window.