Most writing about this category repeats the same advice about lighting. These are the questions we had to answer to build the app — what a crash costs in bytes, why an English words-per-minute constant is wrong for eight of our fifteen languages, and how to test a recorder before you trust a long take to it.
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Put the words in a narrow band directly under the front camera, make them big enough to read one line per glance, set the scroll speed from your own reading rather than a default, and record in short sections. That is the whole method; the rest of this guide is the detail that makes each step work.
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Put the words in a narrow band directly under the front camera, make them big enough to read one line per glance, set the scroll speed from your own reading rather than a default, and record in short sections. That is the whole method; the rest of this guide is the detail that makes each step work.
Most free Android teleprompters will scroll your words. Far fewer will also record the video, let you keep it without a logo or a subscription, and survive a crash halfway through a take. Those are the parts worth checking, and the store listing rarely says.
Put the words as close to the lens as you can, make them big enough that each line is only a few words wide, and read in whole thoughts rather than word by word. Almost everything else is a refinement of those three.
Instagram's teleprompter lives in the camera of the Edits app, and since mid-2026 in the Reels camera too. When it will not appear, will not scroll or runs away from you, the cause is nearly always one of six things — and four of them take under a minute to fix.
CapCut has a free teleprompter built into its mobile camera. It records straight into the editor most short-form creators already use, which is its whole appeal. It is also a recording aid rather than a prompter you can configure deeply, and knowing where it stops saves a wasted afternoon.
A 2-minute speech is about 260 to 300 words; a 5-minute one about 650 to 750. Below is every common length from one minute to twenty, at three paces and in three languages, and the twenty-second test that tells you which column is yours.
Most scripted delivery sounds stiff for the same three reasons: the script was written to be read silently, the speaker is decoding it word by word, and the first take is the one that gets kept. Each has a fix you can apply tonight.
A script you read off a teleprompter is not an essay you happen to say out loud. Write short spoken sentences, one idea each, numbers spelled the way you say them, in a hook – point – proof – ask shape — and time it by word count before you record. Here is the method, a worked rewrite, and a template.
For English, start between 120 and 160 words a minute and adjust from there. The right speed is the one that lets you stay a line ahead of the words — and twenty seconds of reading aloud will tell you what that is for you.
A Reel read off a teleprompter works when the script is short enough to sound spoken and the words sit close enough to the lens that your eyes do not wander. Here is how many words fit each length, how to open, and how to frame for 9:16.
A phone teleprompter is enough for most talking-head YouTube videos, as long as you set it up for the format: landscape and sections for long-form, upright and one take for Shorts. Here is the setup, the script shape, and the settings worth caring about.
Confidence on camera is not a personality trait. It is what happens after enough short, low-stakes recordings that the camera stops being an event — and the fastest route there is to make recording so easy that you do it often.
The fastest way to memorise a script is to break it into chunks, test yourself from memory rather than rereading, and space the sessions out. But word-for-word memorising is often the wrong goal. For most videos and presentations, learning the opening and the close and prompting the middle gets you a natural delivery in a fraction of the time.
Five scripts an agent can record this week — an introduction, a listing tour, a market update, a neighbourhood guide and a testimonial request — each with placeholders, a word count and a running time, plus how to record them on a phone without sounding like you are reading.
LinkedIn takes video from 3 seconds to at least 10 minutes, up to 5 GB, in almost any shape from tall to wide. The specs are the easy part. This is what to post, how to frame it, and three scripts a founder can record on a phone.
The best way to practise a speech is five different runs, each with one job — a read-through, a timed run aloud, a recorded run you actually watch, a pass off a prompter, and a final take. Twenty identical run-throughs mostly rehearse the mistakes.
A studio teleprompter is a screen lying under the camera and a sheet of special glass angled in front of the lens. You read the reflection; the camera looks straight through it. One reflection is all it takes to reverse your script, and no amount of turning the screen will put it right — which is why prompter apps built for glass rigs have a mirror switch.
A teleprompter works for Hindi exactly as it does for English, with three adjustments: a larger text size so the matras stay legible, a slower scroll than an English default, and a clear decision about whether your script is in Devanagari or Hinglish. Here is how to set each one on a phone.
To film yourself talking with a phone: front camera at eye level, about an arm’s length away, facing a window, with a clip-on mic, recording 1080p at 30fps. That covers most of the difference between a home video and one people watch to the end. The rest is detail, and the detail is below.
To record a video presentation on your phone, decide first which parts need slides and which need your face. Record the talking-head parts on the phone in short scripted sections, record the slides with a screen recorder if you need them, and join the two in an editor. Trying to do both in one take on one device is where most of these go wrong.
Detail is one of the best-made video apps on the iPhone, and its free exports carry a watermark. Orate is only a teleprompter, runs on Android, and exports clean. Which one depends on whether you need the edit.
Every figure we can source, in one table, with the ones we cannot marked as unverified rather than quietly filled in. Plus the four questions that decide the choice whichever app you land on.
Not two versions of one app. One is a video production workflow with a prompter inside it; the other stops at the prompter and the camera. Count how often you used the captions last month.
PromptSmart has the better idea — the script follows your voice instead of the other way round. The catch arrives exactly when you press record, and it is why this one is not a walkover in either direction.
The one competitor built to the same brief as us, which makes features almost irrelevant: both are free to install, and only one of them is free to finish.
Sometimes — and it comes down to one decision the app made before you ever pressed record: whether it wrote the file in fragments as it went, or held the index in memory until you pressed stop.
Usually not — and you cannot tell from the store listing, the feature list or the reviews. You can find out in about four minutes, on your own phone, with a script you do not care about.
Nearly every teleprompter treats scroll speed as one number that applies to every script you paste into it. For eight of our fifteen languages that assumption breaks, and for Thai, as for Chinese and Japanese, words per minute is not even a defined quantity.
About 3 minutes 20 seconds in English, at a comfortable 150 words a minute. In Tamil the same 500 words runs to about 4 minutes 21 — and that gap is the thing every single-number calculator gets wrong.
People blame their delivery. Usually the cause is geometry: the angle between the camera lens and the words your eyes are actually tracking. Here is how to work out your own, and how to shrink it.
Voice-following prompters are the best idea in this category, and they have a specific failure: start recording video and the scroll often stops following you. The cause is architectural, not a bug you can wait out.
“Free” in this category can mean free to record and paid to keep. The gate is usually on saving to your gallery, and you meet it after the take rather than before it.
Most teleprompter apps ask you to sign in before you can read your own words off your own phone. There are real reasons for that, and real costs — and if your scripts are confidential, the costs are the part worth reading.
Most “best alternative” lists compare feature counts. The useful question is narrower: are you paying for a video production suite, or for a teleprompter? Because those are two different products at two different prices.
Every figure here is either checkable against the app, cited to its source, or labelled as an estimate. Where a number came off a device, the device and the date are named. Competitor pricing and behaviour are a dated snapshot and they move — re-check before acting on one.