Reply wait time
How long an opening message sits before anyone answers it — the number most people actually mean by "how fast do you reply".
There are two very different things called "reply time" in a chat, and mixing them up produces numbers that don’t match anyone’s intuition. This one measures from the first message that opens a conversation to the first reply from somebody else — the gap between "I texted them" and "they got back to me." Conversations that never got a reply at all are excluded rather than counted as an infinite wait, and the typical measure is a median, because a single three-day silence during a trip shouldn’t drag the whole number up the way an average would.
Example
A median reply wait of 14 seconds means half of all opening messages got an answer within 14 seconds — not that every message did, and not counting the ones nobody answered at all.
Frequently asked questions
Is this the same as how fast someone replies mid-conversation?+
No — that’s a different, usually much smaller number (see burst reply time), because replying inside an ongoing back-and-forth is a different behaviour from answering a message that opened one.
Why exclude unanswered conversations instead of counting them as a long wait?+
Because there’s no honest number for "forever" — including them would make the median entirely dependent on how many unanswered openers happen to be in the export, rather than on how fast the answered ones actually were.
Related terms
- Burst reply timeThe typing-speed number — how fast someone answers while a back-and-forth is already happening, usually measured in seconds.
- Texting asymmetry scoreFour measures combined into one score from −1 to +1 describing which side is putting in more of the texting effort — with a wide "dead even" band on purpose.
- Conversation (session boundary)A run of messages with less than 30 minutes between any two of them — the boundary that separates "a reply" from "starting something new".