A floating teleprompter that sits on top of the app you record with.

What the window is

A teleprompter that only works inside its own app is a teleprompter you can’t film with. Wispim moves the script into a small window that stays on top of other apps, so the phone can be running Camera, Instagram, TikTok or anything else while the script keeps scrolling in front of you. It snaps to a corner the way Picture in Picture does, so you park it next to the lens rather than in the middle of your own shot.

Everything the prompter does underneath carries on inside the window. If you started in Voice mode, the window is still following the words you actually say — pausing when you pause, catching up when you speed up. If you started in Constant mode with a start delay of 5, 10 or 20 seconds, the delay counts down inside the floating window too, so it is still readable with the phone already on a tripod and your hands off it.

Wide or Tall, and which way is up

The window comes in two shapes. Wide is 3:2 and gives you long lines and few of them — good when the phone is landscape or when the window has to live in a strip of screen the camera app isn’t using. Tall is 2:3 and stacks more lines in a narrower column. Which of the two earns its place in a vertical 9:16 frame is worked through on the Reels page.

Rotation is separate: −90°, standard, or 90°. Rotate 90° moves the top edge of the window to the right — clockwise — so when the phone is clamped sideways in a rig, the text still reads the right way up from where you are standing. The two rotations exist because rigs are handed: whichever way your mount turns the phone, one of them puts the first line closest to the lens.

Text scale and side margins inside the window are set independently of the full-screen prompter. That matters more than it sounds: the size that reads well across a whole screen is far too big for a window a fraction of that size, and margins that keep a full page comfortable waste half the width of a small one.

It does not accept touch. That is why the commands exist.

Say it plainly: you cannot tap, drag, pinch or scroll inside the floating window. This is an iOS constraint on windows of this kind — not a Wispim setting you can switch on — and every control that would normally be a tap has to be something else instead.

So there are two ways to drive it without touching anything. Spoken commands pause, continue and jump between sentences — ten languages, with the phrases editable per language, so you can change one that keeps firing inside your script. The volume buttons move one sentence back or forward; they are marked Experimental in the app, and they do not work inside camera apps, because the camera takes those buttons for the shutter. That second half is the one that decides your workflow: if the plan is “window over Camera”, the volume buttons are not the control you build the take around — your voice is.

When another app takes the microphone

This is the failure mode every voice-following prompter has, and it is worth knowing exactly how Wispim handles it, in both directions.

The first half is the good news: voice following keeps up while you record in Camera, Instagram and TikTok. Those three are tested, and they are the ones most people are filming with — the TikTok and Reels pages go into what a take actually looks like in each.

The second half is what happens when an app does take the microphone away, which some do. Wispim switches to Constant on its own so the take continues instead of freezing mid-sentence, tells you in a banner that it has done so, and switches back to voice following when the microphone returns. It is on by default and there is a switch in Settings to turn it off. It is the one behaviour worth knowing before a shoot you can’t redo — and why the video-call page is honest that call apps are untested territory.

About the picture at the top of this page

It is built in HTML, not captured from a phone. The floating window doesn’t engage in the iOS Simulator, so a real screenshot has to be shot on hardware and there isn’t one yet. The illustration is drawn to the Wide window’s 3:2 shape, in a corner the window can snap to — but it is not a screen grab, and this page won’t pretend otherwise.

The floating window is in the free tier along with the rest of the prompter — free gives you 6 prompter takes with unlimited scripts, and Pro is what removes that limit and adds import from PDF, Word and RTF. iPhone, iOS 16 or later.