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

Wide or Tall, 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 two shapes — Wide (3:2) and Tall (2:3) — and on a 9:16 frame they cover completely different parts of the picture, so the choice is worth thirty seconds before you hit record.

The rule of thumb: the more of the frame you fill, the more a Tall window earns its place. It is a column, so it leaves the centre of the preview clear and you can still see whether you are framed; and short lines mean your eyes travel less sideways, which is most of what reading on camera actually costs you. Step back for a wider shot and Wide is the better trade — 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. Whichever you pick, it snaps to a corner rather than sitting where you drop it; 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 text scale and side margins are set separately from the full-screen prompter’s, so you can push the scale up and pull the margins in for the take without disturbing the comfortable size you rehearsed at.

How a take actually goes

Pick Voice, hand the script to the floating window, then open Instagram and frame up. There is no countdown to beat: 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 rather than carrying on without you.

Cross-posting 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, Wispim switches to Constant on its own so the take carries on instead of freezing, tells you in a banner, and switches back when the microphone comes free — the hand-off in both directions is set out on the floating window page.

Inside Instagram, your voice is the control surface

The floating window does not accept touch — an iOS constraint — and 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 actually have are spoken: pause, continue and jump between sentences, 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, and the app tells you before and during the take. How voice following works goes through the three modes and that split in detail.