> Americans are speaking less and less to one another. The number of spoken words uttered by the average person fell by 28% between 2005 and 2019.

Is it just me or does anyone else turn skeptical when seeing these precise numbers given to something that seems essentially impossible to measure with this accuracy?

That's the central measure of 338 fewer words per day, but the 95% confidence interval was 25–652 fewer words.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916261425131

There is an interview with the authors here:

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-people-spoken-words-year-years...