Online Teleprompter

How to use an online teleprompter for video and presentations

A teleprompter does one simple job: it moves your script past your eyes at the pace you speak, so you can look at the camera or the audience instead of down at notes. Broadcasters have used them for seventy years. The difference today is that you no longer need a hardware rig. A browser tab in front of a webcam does the same thing, and this page is exactly that.

The workflow takes about a minute. Paste your script into the box above. Press Start prompter and the page becomes a full-screen dark display with your words in large, light text. Press Space to start the scroll, and adjust the speed with the arrow keys until the highlighted reading line stays on the sentence you are saying. Press Escape when you are done.

Where you put the screen matters more than any setting. Your eyes always drift toward the text, so the text should be as close to the camera lens as possible. On a laptop, that means shrinking the prompter window and dragging it to the top of the screen, right under the webcam. On a phone, use the front camera and keep the font small so the text stays near the top edge. If the text is in the centre of a large monitor while the camera sits on top, viewers will see your eyes looking a few centimetres below the lens on every shot.

For a live presentation, the setup is different. Nobody is looking at a lens, so the prompter can sit on a laptop at the front of the stage, or on a tablet on the lectern. Here the point is not eye contact with a camera but freedom to look up at the room and come back to the right sentence. A slower scroll and a bigger font help, because you are glancing rather than reading continuously.

What scroll speed should a teleprompter use?

Most people speak at between 130 and 160 words per minute in conversation. Presenters tend to slow to 110 to 140 words per minute, and narration for video often sits around 150. The right teleprompter speed is whatever keeps the reading line on the words you are actually saying, which depends on your font size as well as your pace, because bigger text means each line holds fewer words and the page has to move faster.

The speed slider here goes from 1 to 10. At the default font size of 40 pixels, speed 4 to 5 roughly matches a measured presenter and speed 6 to 7 matches a quick conversational pace. Rather than calculating it, do a thirty-second test read. If you find yourself waiting for the next line, nudge the speed up with the up arrow. If you are racing to keep up, nudge it down. Two or three adjustments is usually enough, and the setting is remembered for next time.

One practical tip: write your script at the speed you actually talk. If you read the sample above aloud and time it, you will get a feel for how many words fit in a minute for you. A ten-minute video at 140 words per minute is about 1,400 words. If your script is 2,000 words and you have ten minutes, no scroll speed will fix that. Cut the script, not the pauses.

Font size by distance from the screen

Font size is the second half of readability, and it depends almost entirely on how far your eyes are from the screen. Too small and you squint, which the camera catches. Too large and only a few words fit on a line, so the text has to scroll fast and your eyes make visible jumps from line to line.

A rough guide: for a phone held thirty to forty centimetres away, 24 to 30 pixels is comfortable. For a laptop at a normal typing distance, 32 to 44 pixels. For a monitor or tablet a metre away, 48 to 56 pixels. For a screen two or more metres away, use the maximum, 72 pixels, and expect to read in short phrases rather than full sentences. The slider in the prompter goes from 24 to 72 pixels, and the text column is capped at around 900 pixels wide so lines stay a comfortable length even on a wide monitor.

Line length matters too. Professional prompters show short lines, usually five to seven words, because the eye reads a short line in one fixation and does not need to sweep left and right. The narrower your prompter window, the less your eyes move, and the less obvious it is on camera that you are reading. If you are using a laptop, do not be afraid to shrink the browser window to half the screen width.

Mirror mode explained

Mirror mode flips the text horizontally so it reads backwards on the screen. That sounds useless until you understand how a beam-splitter teleprompter works. In a beam-splitter rig, the screen lies flat below the camera, facing up, and a sheet of partially reflective glass sits at forty-five degrees in front of the lens. You see the script reflected in the glass, and the camera films straight through it. The reflection flips the image, so the screen has to show the text mirrored for you to read it correctly.

If you have bought or built one of these rigs, turn mirror mode on. The toggle is in the control bar inside the prompter and is remembered between visits. Many affordable rigs take a phone or small tablet as the display, and the page works on both. If you are reading straight off a laptop screen or a phone with no glass in the way, leave mirror off, because the text will simply look backwards.

A common question is whether a beam-splitter is worth it. For talking-head video where you want to look exactly at the lens, it is the only way to get perfect eye contact with a long script. For most webcam recordings, a narrow prompter window tucked under the camera is close enough that nobody notices.

How to not look like you are reading

Everyone can tell when a presenter is reading badly. The eyes track left to right, the voice flattens into the same rhythm on every sentence, and the pauses land in the wrong places. None of that is caused by the teleprompter. It is caused by reading a script that was written for the page rather than the mouth, at a speed set by the machine rather than the speaker.

The first fix is to read ahead. Keep the reading line a sentence above where you are speaking, so you are saying a sentence you have already seen. That gives you the room to look away, pause, and come back without losing your place. It also means you are delivering a thought rather than decoding words one at a time.

The second fix is to stop scrolling at the right speed and start speaking at the right speed. If you lock the scroll to your natural pace, the text becomes a reminder rather than a conveyor belt. Pause whenever you would pause in conversation. The text will wait for a line or two before you need to adjust. If you find yourself constantly adjusting, slow the scroll down slightly and let the script arrive just before you need it.

The third fix is in the camera setup. A narrow column close to the lens hides the eye movement. A slight smile at the start of each paragraph breaks the flat delivery. And the single most useful habit is to practise the script aloud two or three times before recording, so the first take with the prompter is not the first time the words have come out of your mouth.

• Keep the reading line one sentence ahead of your voice.
• Put the prompter window directly under or over the camera, and make it narrow.
• Pause where you would pause when talking. The scroll can wait.
• Mark emphasis in the script itself: capitalise a word, add a line break before a key point.
• Record a thirty-second test and watch it back. Your eyes will tell you what to fix.

Writing a script that sounds spoken

The best teleprompter in the world cannot rescue a script written like an essay. Spoken language uses shorter sentences, more contractions, and more repetition than written language. It names the listener directly. It signposts what is coming. If you are reading a script and it sounds stiff, the problem is usually on the page.

A few habits help. Write in the first and second person, so you and I rather than the viewer and the presenter. Keep sentences under twenty words where you can, and put one idea in each. Read every paragraph aloud as you write it and change anything you stumbled over. Use blank lines between paragraphs, because the prompter preserves them and a blank line gives your eye a landmark. Put a line break before anything you want to land with a pause, because a visual break tends to become a spoken one.

Finally, treat the script as something you know rather than something you read. The teleprompter is there to make sure you do not forget the structure, miss a point, or ramble. It is not there to replace preparation. A speaker who has rehearsed the script three times and then reads from the prompter sounds like someone talking. A speaker reading it for the first time sounds like someone reading. The difference is practice, and practising out loud, with something listening and giving feedback, is the fastest way to close it. That is what Pavone is built for: you pick a scenario, speak, and get told what to fix.