Online Teleprompter

Put the prompter as close to the lens as you can. On a laptop, that means the browser window narrow and pushed up under the webcam, the text size large enough to read from arm's length, and your eyes on the top third of the screen, where the reading line sits. On a phone propped behind or beside the camera, a narrow line width keeps your eyes from travelling. For a camera with a beam-splitter hood, switch on mirror mode and the glass flips it back.

A 60-second video is about 140 words at the average pace; a two-minute pitch about 280. Write the script in short sentences and one idea per paragraph, read it through once at the set speed, and then slow it down by one step: almost everyone speaks faster to a camera than they think.

Start at 5 on the scale, which is 140 words a minute, the Speech Time Calculator's average preset. It is a rule of thumb, not a measurement: the right pace is the one at which you finish a sentence as it reaches the reading line, without chasing it. A product demo with pauses for the screen reads at 3 or 4; a voicemail greeting or a cold-call opener, which you half know by heart, at 6 or 7.

Time one full run with the estimate in the editor. If you finish well before the text does, go up a step; if you are talking over the end of each line, go down. The arrow keys change the speed while it is running, so you can correct it on the second sentence rather than the second take.

A beam-splitter teleprompter is a sheet of half-silvered glass at 45 degrees in front of the lens, with a screen lying flat below it. The camera looks through the glass; you see the screen reflected in it, which means you look straight down the lens while reading. The reflection is reversed, so the screen has to show the text mirrored. That is what the mirror toggle does: a horizontal flip of the text, nothing else.

Reading from the screen directly, mirror stays off. If the text looks backwards on the glass, you have it off when it should be on; if it looks backwards on the screen, the other way round.

The scripts people bring here are short and spoken: a two-minute pitch for a video or a call, a voicemail greeting recorded in one clean take, a product demo narrated over a screen recording, a conference talk's opening two minutes, a cold-call opener rehearsed until it no longer sounds rehearsed. The AI Sales Pitch Generator and the Voicemail Script Generator each have an Open in teleprompter button on their results, so the script is here in one click.

The prompter does not record. For the audio, the Online Voice Recorder runs in the same browser; for a real call, the ParrotNotes app records it on your phone and gives you the transcript, so you know what the customer said back.