Free online teleprompter

A teleprompter online that scrolls in words per minute

Almost every teleprompter online gives you a speed slider labelled 1 to 10 and leaves you to find your pace by trial and error. That is a strange thing to ask of someone about to talk to a camera. Speed 6 means something different once you have changed the font size, because those sliders move pixels per frame, and pixels per frame depend on how big the type is and how wide the column runs.

This one asks for a number you already know: how many words a minute you speak. It measures the rendered height of your script, divides by the number of words in it, and derives the pixels per second needed to carry those words past the reading line at that rate. Change the type size, the line height or the margins and the pace stays honest, because the pixels-per-word figure is re-measured rather than assumed. Both numbers are shown under the reader.

If you do not know your own pace, find it before the shoot. Reading aloud to a camera, most people land between 120 and 160 words a minute; conversational delivery sits near 150, formal delivery near 120. The speech time calculator turns a word count into a runtime at those paces, and the voice typing test will measure your real rate if you would rather not guess.

Why a free online teleprompter is enough for most shoots

A free online teleprompter has one real advantage over a desktop application: there is nothing to install on the machine you happen to be filming with. Prompting usually happens on a borrowed laptop or a tablet propped against a lens hood, and the last thing you want fifteen minutes before a recording is an installer and a licence key. The browser is also where your script already lives.

Everything here runs on your own device. The scrolling is a requestAnimationFrame loop, the mirroring is a CSS transform, the fullscreen view is the browser’s own. There is no account and no watermark. The script is saved to this browser’s local storage so it survives a refresh or a closed lid; that storage sits on your machine, and if your browser blocks it the tool says so and keeps working.

Is any teleprompter app free in practice?

Plenty of listings promise a teleprompter app free to download, and most are free until the moment you need something from it. The patterns are worth naming:

• Free to read, paid to record. The prompter scrolls, but the recording is watermarked or capped at a minute until you subscribe.
• Free until you want mirror mode. Mirroring is one line of CSS, and it sits behind the paywall because anyone with a beam-splitter rig will pay.
• Free with an account. Your script is stored on someone else’s server so it can sync across devices you did not ask it to sync across.
• Free with AI. Voice-following or script rewriting, which requires the text — and often the audio — to be sent somewhere for processing.

This page has no recording, no account and no AI, which is why nothing needs to be sent anywhere. What it has is the part you were going to use anyway: text that moves at a pace you chose, in type you can read from where you are standing.

Teleprompter mirror mode, and what a beam-splitter rig does

The teleprompter mirror setting looks pointless until you have seen the hardware. A proper prompter is a box holding a sheet of partially reflective glass at forty-five degrees in front of the lens, with a screen lying flat underneath it facing up. The glass reflects the screen towards the speaker and passes the speaker’s image through to the camera, so you read text that appears to float exactly where the lens is. Your eyes are on the words and on the lens at the same time.

A reflection reverses left and right, so the text has to be reversed before it is reflected or it comes back as mirror writing. That is all mirror mode does. The second toggle flips top to bottom, for rigs that mount the tablet upside down — unusual, but the setups that need it have no other way to work. Reading straight off a laptop with no glass in front of it, leave both off; mirroring an unmirrored setup is the most common reason a first-time user thinks the tool is broken.

Script scroller settings that actually change the read

Treat this as a script scroller you tune once for your room, then leave alone. Four settings do the work.

• Side margin. The most under-used control here. Full-width lines force your eyes to sweep, and on camera that reads as scanning. Pull the margins in until each line holds five to nine words, so your eyes drop rather than sweep.
• Font size. Set it by distance, not taste. If you can read it comfortably from where you will actually stand, it is big enough; if you lean in, it is not.
• Line height. Loose leading, 1.5 or more, gives the eye a clean track back to the next line. Tight leading is fine on paper and bad on moving text.
• Colours. White on black is the default because a dark panel throws less light back at your face. Black on white exists for bright rooms where a dark screen becomes a mirror of the window behind you.

One thing that is about the script rather than the settings: write for the mouth, not the page. Before a shoot, run the text through the sentence counter and split anything past thirty words. A script averaging fifteen words a sentence is far easier to read at pace than one averaging thirty, at identical length.

Using it as a teleprompter for YouTube videos

For a teleprompter for YouTube videos filmed on a laptop or a phone with no rig at all, eyeline is the whole game. Viewers cannot articulate what is wrong when a presenter reads, but they feel it: the eyes track left to right in a repeating pattern, and it reads as recital rather than conversation.

Two adjustments fix most of it. Get the text as close to the lens as you can — the camera preview button pins a small self-view near the top edge of the reader, under the built-in webcam, so you can see where your eyes land. Then move the whole screen further away and raise the type size to compensate. At arm’s length the angle between lens and text is a few degrees and nobody notices; at thirty centimetres it is twenty degrees and everybody does. Record a throwaway ten seconds and check the eyeline before you commit to a take.

What this deliberately does not do

It cannot drive an external hardware prompter. Broadcast prompters take a video feed or a serial connection from prompting software, and a web page has access to neither. Mirror this tab onto a second display and that display can sit in a beam-splitter rig, but nothing here talks to prompter hardware directly.

There is no remote control. Operators run the scroll from a hand controller or a foot pedal; this has only the keyboard — space to start and pause, arrow keys to change pace mid-read, Home to jump back to the top.

It does not follow your voice. Voice-following prompters listen to what you are saying and advance to keep up, which needs a microphone open for the whole take and, in every implementation that works well, audio sent to a server. That is a real trade, and not one this page makes quietly. And a browser tab is not the right tool for a long shoot: notifications appear, background tabs get throttled, and a two-hour read deserves software with an operator behind it.

Where VoiceSnap Pro fits

A prompter helps you read a script. VoiceSnap Pro helps you write one. It is a dictation app for macOS and Windows: hold one keyboard shortcut, speak, and clean punctuated text appears in whatever field your cursor is already in — the document you are drafting in, the email, the notes app. It adds punctuation and paragraph breaks as it transcribes, strips filler words, and saves every dictation to a searchable notes library. It is a one-time $39 purchase, not a subscription.

The reason it belongs on this page: a script you spoke first reads far better out loud than a script you typed. Talk through the piece, dictate it, tidy the result, then paste it in here. VoiceSnap Pro has not shipped yet — join the waitlist for one email on release day. Meanwhile the word counter will tell you whether the draft fits the runtime you have.