Teleprompter scroll speed: what to set, and how to find yours

A good teleprompter speed for English is 120–160 words per minute, and 150 is a sensible place to start. But the right speed is personal and it changes with the kind of video you are making, so treat any number as a starting point and calibrate it to your own voice in about twenty seconds.

This post is about choosing and adjusting the speed. Why one words-per-minute figure cannot serve Hindi, Tamil, Arabic or Chinese is a separate problem, covered in teleprompter speed by language; if your script is not in English, read that next.

What speed should a teleprompter be?

Fast enough that you never wait for words, slow enough that you can stay a line ahead of them. In practice, for English read aloud on camera:

These are practical starting points, not measurements. They match the range most speaking guides quote for reading aloud, and the reason they overlap is that the same person reads differently depending on what they are saying. If you are working out how long a script should be rather than how fast to scroll it, the word counts for each length are in how many words is a one, two or five minute speech.

Find your own speed in twenty seconds

Every number above is an average, and the difference between people is larger than the difference between formats. This is quicker than trial and error:

1. Take a paragraph of your own script — your words and your subject, not a sample text.
2. Read it aloud for exactly 20 seconds, at the pace you would use on camera. Stand up if you will stand up for the take.
3. Count the words you got through and multiply by three.
4. Set the prompter to that rate, or the nearest equivalent, and record a test take.

Most prompter apps do not show words per minute; they show a speed slider with an arbitrary scale, or a multiplier. In that case, use the number to judge the first test take: time how long the prompter takes to scroll a script of known length, and move the slider until it matches the duration your rate predicts. A 300-word script at 150 words a minute should take two minutes.

Signs your teleprompter is too fast

• You are reading the bottom of the reading area. The line you are saying should be near the top, with the next one or two visible below it.
• Your pauses disappear. You stop leaving a beat after a point because the words keep coming.
• You stumble on easy words. Not because the script is hard but because you did not see them coming.
• Your voice rises in pitch through the take. A quiet sign of chasing the text.
• Your eyes are visibly locked on the screen. When you cannot read ahead, you cannot glance up at the lens.

Signs it is too slow

• You run out of words mid-sentence and either wait or start improvising.
• Your delivery drags. You stretch words to fill the time, which sounds like reading to a child.
• You look down to find the next line. If the text is not there yet, you search for it, and the search shows.
• Pauses appear in odd places, at the line ends rather than at the ends of thoughts.

If you are unsure which it is, slightly slow is the safer error. You can always speak a fraction faster than the scroll and let the words catch up at the next pause; you cannot speak faster than words you have not seen yet.

Why one speed rarely works for a whole take

A script is not uniform. The introduction tends to be read faster, from nerves. A list of steps or figures is read slower. A story in the middle speeds up because you know it. If the prompter scrolls at a constant rate, it is right for some of those sections and wrong for others.

There are three ways to deal with that, from simplest to best:

1. Set the speed for the slowest section and allow yourself to read slightly ahead elsewhere. Workable for short videos.
2. Split the script. Record the dense section separately at a lower speed and cut the takes together.
3. Adjust during the take. Only practical if the speed control is reachable while you record and the script does not jump when you touch it. On many apps it lives in a settings sheet that pauses the recording, which defeats the point.

Voice-following prompters try to solve this automatically by listening to you. The idea is good; the catch is that on a phone the recorder and the speech recogniser compete for the microphone, and the scroll often stops following you once video recording starts. We wrote up why in why voice-tracked scrolling stops when you record video.

Things that change the right speed

• Text size. Larger text means fewer words a line and more frequent line changes. The words-per-minute rate is the same, but it can feel faster. Give it a take before changing the speed.
• Numbers and names. “2026” is one word and five syllables. A script full of figures needs a slower scroll than its word count suggests — or, better, figures spelled the way you say them, as in how to write a video script for a teleprompter.
• Familiarity. By the third take you will be faster than on the first. Expect to nudge the speed up between takes.
• Language. A rate tuned to English words is too fast for languages whose words carry more syllables, and meaningless for languages not written with spaces between words. See teleprompter speed by language.
• Where the words sit. A band directly under the lens lets you glance up and back without losing your place, which tolerates a slightly faster speed than a full-screen script. The setup is in how to read a script while looking at the camera.

How studio prompters handle speed, and what to borrow

In a television studio, the prompter does not scroll at a fixed rate at all. An operator watches the presenter and moves the text with a hand control, speeding up through the easy sentences and holding still through a pause. That is why newsreaders can leave long beats without the words running away from them.

On a phone, you are the operator and the presenter at once, so you cannot copy that exactly. You can borrow two habits from it:

• The current line sits high. Operators keep the line being spoken near the top of the screen, with plenty of the next sentence visible beneath it. Aim for the same position when you judge whether your speed is right.
• A pause is the speaker’s, not the prompter’s. If you want a long beat after an important line, write a blank line or two into the script there. The scroll keeps moving, but the gap gives you room to wait without falling behind.

Keep a note of your number

Once you have a speed that works, write it down along with the kind of video it was for. Most people end up with two or three: one for explainers, one for short social clips, one for anything read in a second language. Starting the next session from your own note is faster than starting from the app’s default and finding your way back.

It is also worth re-running the twenty-second test every few months. Speakers who record regularly tend to get faster and looser over time, and a speed that suited your first video can feel sluggish by your twentieth.

Setting the speed in Orate

In Orate, the starting speed comes from the script itself. The app works out which writing system the script is in and starts at a default rate for it — 150 words a minute for Latin scripts such as English or Spanish, 130 for Devanagari, Bengali and Arabic, 115 for Tamil and Telugu, and 250 characters a minute for Chinese, Japanese and Thai. Those are informed defaults rather than measurements of how fast people read, and the read time shown under each script is calculated from them.

From there, the pace slider runs from 0.4× to 2× of that rate and lives on the recorder rather than in the settings sheet. Drag it mid-take and the script keeps its place, so the slow section in the middle of your explainer can be slowed while you are in it. There is a prompter-only mode, with the camera off, for running the twenty-second test above without recording anything.

For the rest of the setup — placement, text size, reading window — the pillar guide is how to use a teleprompter on your phone.

Questions people ask

What is a good teleprompter speed?

For English, 120 to 160 words per minute suits most people reading on camera, with 150 a sensible default. Slow, careful explanations sit nearer 120 and energetic short-form videos nearer 170.

How do I work out my own teleprompter speed?

Read a piece of your own script aloud for exactly 20 seconds at your on-camera pace, count the words, and multiply by three. That is your words-per-minute rate.

Should a teleprompter scroll faster or slower than I speak?

At the same rate, with your current line near the top of the reading area. If you are chasing the bottom edge it is too fast; if you are waiting for words to appear it is too slow.

Why does my teleprompter speed feel different every take?

Because delivery changes with energy, nerves and familiarity. Most people speed up as they get to know a script and slow down when tired, so adjust the speed between takes rather than fixing it once.

Is teleprompter speed the same in every language?

No. Words differ in length between languages and some languages are not counted in words at all, so a rate tuned for English will be too fast for a Tamil or Hindi script of the same word count.