Teleprompter for Zoom calls and meetings

A call is not a recording

A recorded piece to camera runs from the first word to the last at a speed you set. A call does not. Somebody asks a question in the second paragraph, somebody's connection drops, the chair moves the agenda, and any script rolling at a fixed pace is now behind you or ahead of you.

So the prompter's job on a call is smaller and more specific than it is in front of a camera. It holds the parts that have to come out right, and it waits while you do the rest. Pause is the control you will use most: the button in the dock, or the space bar when the caret is not in the script box.

What to script, and what to leave alone

Scripting an entire meeting produces the flat delivery everyone recognises within a sentence. Scripting nothing means the one number you needed comes out wrong.

On the prompter, written out in full:

The opening. The first thirty seconds set how the rest of the call is heard, and they are the part you are most likely to fumble.
Any sentence that has to be exact. A price, a date, a legal line, a title, a commitment you will be held to.
Numbers, and what they mean. Reading "up eleven per cent on the quarter" off a line beats recalling it while eleven faces watch you.
The ask. The single sentence naming what you want to happen next, which is the sentence people most often talk around.
The close.

Better left as a few words you can glance at: your answers to anything predictable. Reading an answer to a question sounds like reading an answer to a question, and on a call that reads as evasion rather than preparation.

Where the browser window goes

The camera is at the top of your screen and the reading line lies across the middle of the stage, so window height decides how far your eyes travel. A short, wide browser window parked directly under the camera puts the words within a couple of centimetres of the lens. A maximised window puts them half a screen lower, which everyone on the call can see.

Fullscreen is the wrong choice during a meeting for the same reason it is the right one for a recording: it takes the whole display, and you lose sight of the faces and the meeting controls. Keep the stage in a small window, in front of the meeting window or overlapping its edge.

With two screens, put the prompter on whichever one has the camera and leave the call on the other. Details of both arrangements are on the Mac and Windows pages.

Eye contact is judged more closely on a call than on camera

In a video, your face is one element in a composed shot. On a call it fills a tile a foot from someone's eyes, and the tile next to it is a colleague watching you. A downward flick that would be invisible in a wide shot is obvious here, and a script sitting off to one side of the screen is worse than no script at all: it turns every sentence into a glance sideways.

That is the argument for moving the window before the call rather than trying to fix your delivery during it.

If you share your entire screen, your script is on the call. Everything you wrote down about the people in the meeting is on the call with it.

Share a specific window or a single tab instead. If you have to share a whole screen, put the prompter on the other display, or read from a phone or tablet propped beside the camera. The iPhone and iPad pages cover that arrangement, and it is the only one that stays safe without you having to remember anything.

Before a call that matters, share what you plan to share once and look at what actually appears.

The microphone is already spoken for

Voice follow listens through your microphone and moves the script to match your reading. In a meeting, your meeting software is using that same microphone. Whether your machine will hand the same input to both at once depends on your operating system and your browser, so test it on your own setup before a call rather than discovering the answer during one.

If it does not work, nothing is lost. The timed roll at your speaking rate, plus the pause button, covers a call perfectly well, and pausing is something you will be doing anyway. What voice follow does and where the audio goes is on the voice follow page.

Speed, pauses and getting back to the right place

Set the speed slower than you would for a recording. On camera you are talking to a lens at your own pace. On a call you are talking to people who interrupt, and you want to be able to stop cleanly rather than to catch up. Somewhere near the bottom of the usual 120 to 160 words per minute range suits most meetings.

The pattern that works: pause when a question comes, answer it off the script, then start again from where you stopped. If the conversation has moved past a section entirely, switch to the next script rather than scrolling. The dock keeps several scripts side by side and lets you swap between them, so an agenda with four items can be four scripts, each with its own length shown next to the transport.

Recue takes you back to the top of the current one, which is the button for "they want me to run through that again".

Line by line, instead of a constant glide

The motion control has a stepped setting that moves the script one line at a time instead of gliding. On a call this is often the better mode, because you are looking up at faces constantly and having to find your place again each time you look back. A line that arrives and then holds still is easier to return to than text in continuous motion.

Left on its default the setting follows what you have asked your system for, so if you have reduced motion turned on, you get stepping without having to ask twice. Stepping covers the same distance in the same total time, so the duration next to the transport still holds.

Webinars, panels and anything with slides

When slides are shared full screen there is no room left for a prompter on that display, and putting one on top of the slides risks it appearing in the share. Move the script to a phone or tablet beside the camera and treat your computer as the presentation machine.

For a panel or a webinar where you speak in short turns, one script per turn works better than one long document: an opening statement, the points you intend to make, and a closing line, each on its own.

Nobody on the call sees any of this

The prompter is a browser tab on your machine. Nothing about it is transmitted unless you deliberately share the screen or window it is on.

The script itself never leaves your device either. It sits in this browser's local storage, not in an account and not on our servers, which is what makes it usable for the kind of thing people actually read off a prompter in meetings: a redundancy conversation, an unannounced number, a legal statement, a board update nobody has cleared. The same fact has a cost: a script written on your laptop is not waiting on your phone, and clearing your browsing data clears it.

Questions

Can the other people on the call see my script? No, unless you share the screen or the window it is on. Share a single application window and it cannot appear.

Does this only work with Zoom? The prompter has no idea what you are running. It is a browser window, so the same arrangement works for any meeting software you use.

Does it record the call? No. It scrolls a script. Recording is your meeting software's job.

Will my script be uploaded anywhere? No. It stays in your browser on your own machine. There is no account and no sign up.

How fast should I set it for a meeting? Slower than you would for a video. Start around 120 words per minute, read a paragraph on the prompter, and adjust from there.