What is required to archive a lifetime of personal speech that has been transcribed into text?

Normal speech is 120 words per minute. A person listens half of the time, which averages 60 wpm. You probably do silent activities, including sleep, 12 hours per day, which leaves 12 hours for talking.

Words spoken per day = 60 x 60 x 12 = 43,200 words.

A conversational lifetime is 70 years, or 70 x 365 = 25,550 days.

Words spoken per lifetime are 43,200 x 25,550 = 1,103,760,000.

An average printed word is 6 characters or 6 bytes.

Lifetime data = 1,103,760,000 x 6 = 6.6 gigabytes.

SanDisk now markets a 4GB flash drive widely sold for around $90. That should be more than enough for a slightly bashful person, for his entire life. By the end of this year, we may see 8GB flash drives on the market for the same price. We will run out of words, but never out of memory.

Average reading speed is about twice as fast as talking, but few of us read more than six hours each day. Therefore, another 4GB key fob is sufficient to store all the printed pages we will each read during a lifetime.