A teleprompter for Instagram Reels that shares the frame with you.

Wide, Tall or Strip, on a 9:16 screen

A Reel is shot in portrait, which means the floating window and your own face are competing for the same narrow screen. Wispim gives the window three shapes: Wide 3:2, Tall 2:3 and Strip, a thin band sized for two lines. On a 9:16 frame they cover completely different parts of the picture, so the choice is worth thirty seconds before you hit record.

As a rule, the more of the frame you fill, the more a Tall window helps. It is a column, so it leaves the centre of the preview clear and you can still check your framing. Short lines also mean your eyes travel less sideways, which is most of what reading on camera costs you. Step back for a wider shot and Wide works better, because long lines have room to be large and a band across a frame you are standing away from covers less of what you need to check. Strip works differently: two lines just under the front camera, so your eyes barely leave the lens, but you see very little of what is coming. Whichever you pick, it snaps to a corner; the shapes, the rotation and the corner snap are set out on the floating window page.

Making a small window readable from where you stand

A Reel is usually shot with the phone propped at arm’s length or further back, and a window taking up a fifth of the screen is only worth having if it reads from there. The window’s side margins are set separately from the full-screen prompter’s, so you can pull them in and give the lines the whole width of a small window. The text size follows the script’s own, scaled to the shape you picked, so the size you rehearsed at is the size you read at.

How a take goes

Pick Voice, hand the script to the floating window, then open Instagram and frame up. The start delay runs first, ten seconds on a new script, and the script holds still until it ends. After that, in Voice and Sound the prompter waits for you to speak, so you can start recording, breathe, find the first line in your head, and nothing moves until the words come out. Pause mid-sentence and it waits. Speed up and it keeps up. Say an earlier line again, the thing you do on the fourth attempt at an opener, and it scrolls back to that line.

If you cross-post the same take, filming for TikTok covers reading ahead between takes and picking a line up again after a re-shoot.

Instagram and the microphone

Instagram is one of the three apps the microphone hand-off is tested against, with Camera and TikTok: voice following keeps up while the Reel is recording. If another app does take the microphone, the text holds on the word you reached and a note says “Mic busy”. Wispim keeps asking for the microphone back and carries on from that word when it comes free. The hand-off in both directions is set out on the floating window page.

Inside Instagram, your voice is the control surface

Nothing inside the floating window responds to touch, which is an iOS constraint. The volume buttons, which move one sentence back or forward, are marked Experimental in the app and do not work inside camera apps, which take those buttons for the shutter. Instagram’s recording screen is one of those. So on a Reel the controls you have are spoken: pause, continue, go back a sentence, start over or jump to the end, in any of the ten command languages, with the phrases editable if one of them keeps firing inside your script.

Voice following itself works in every language your iPhone can recognise: 60+ locales on current iOS. Recognition runs on your iPhone where your language supports it; where it does not, iOS sends the audio to Apple to convert it to text. The language picker marks those languages before you start. How voice following works goes through the three modes and that split in detail.