Teleprompter Online

How the teleprompter moves your script

There are two ways to run it. In the default mode the text rises at a speed you set in words per minute, from 60 to 240 in steps of 10. The page measures your script as it is laid out on screen and turns that speed into pixels per second, so 130 words per minute means the same thing at any text size and line width. The time left at that speed counts down in the corner, and the line you should be reading sits next to the marker, about a third of the way down the screen; lines you have already read fade back.

The second mode, Follow my voice, uses the speech recognition built into your browser. While you read, the page compares the last six words it heard with the script around your position (eight words back, sixty ahead) and brings the matched word to the marker. If you pause, the script waits. If you skip a sentence, it catches up as soon as it recognises you again; if you jump further, drag or scroll the text and it continues from there. Small recognition slips — a plural, a different spelling — still match.

Settings that matter on camera

• Mirror flips the text left to right for a beam-splitter glass rig; Upside down flips it vertically for rigs that need it. Both can be on together.
• Text size goes from 20 to 120 pixels. From a laptop at arm's length 40–60 px reads comfortably; on a phone clipped under the lens, smaller is fine.
• Text width narrows the column so your eyes move less, which shows less on camera.
• Full screen hides everything but the script and the controls. On an iPhone, where Safari has no full-screen mode for pages, the prompter covers the window instead.
• A 3-second countdown before the text starts moving, on by default.

Keyboard: Space starts and pauses, the up and down arrows move the text a line, left and right change the speed, F toggles full screen, M toggles mirror and Home returns to the top. While the prompter runs, the page asks the device to keep the screen awake where the browser allows it.

How long will my script take to read?

At the conversational pace of 130 words per minute that this tool starts at — the same figure our speech time calculator uses — a 300-word script takes about 2 minutes 18 seconds. For comparison, a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert in the Journal of Memory and Language put adult reading aloud at 183 words per minute on average, so a prompter set to 130 leaves room for pauses and emphasis.

Honest limits

Voice follow needs the Web Speech API: Chrome and Edge on desktop and Android, Safari on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Firefox has no speech recognition, so there the prompter runs at manual speed. In Chrome the audio is processed by Google's recognition service and needs an internet connection; in Safari by Apple's. This site never receives your audio or your script. Recognition works best in languages that separate words with spaces; for Chinese and Japanese the page matches character by character, which follows less tightly. The script and your settings are saved in this browser's storage only, so they are not on your other devices.