If you’re looking to make a video and don’t like speaking off the cuff, there’s a free Teleprompter utility to help out — all you have to do is pull up their website in your browser and copy and paste whatever script (or notes) you’ll want to scroll on your screen. You can adjust the speed of the scrolling and the text size using sliders — and you’ll definitely want to play with both so you get the perfect combination that works best for your speaking cadence.
You can’t adjust anything while your words are scrolling, but you can use some helpful keyboard shortcuts to tweak your pre-prompt settings. Adjust the scrolling speed by mashing the left and right arrows on your keyboard, for example, or use up and down make the font size bigger and smaller. While your words are scrolling, you can stop and start by mashing the space bar, or rewind to the beginning (and stop) by pressing Escape.
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The free teleprompter lets you copy and paste your words in either plain text or rich text formats, and you can tweak the margins and justification for the perfect look for your virtual teleprompter. You can even flip the entire screen horizontally or vertically if you need your text mirrored for whatever setup you’re using.
Finally, and most importantly, you can save and open scripts to your desktop. This won’t save your settings, just the words, but it’s a convenient way to save or import your scripts if you don’t want to fuss with copying and pasting all over again.
Although the Teleprompter website also offers a voice-activated function, which would presumably allow the text to scroll whenever, I couldn’t get it to work on Edge Chromium, but it worked perfectly on standard Chrome. You have to read exactly what’s on the screen for the scrolling to trigger, but it’s useful if you need to insert a bit more acting into your delivery rather than relying on a set scroll speed.
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