A teleprompter for online teachers, built for the long take

Forty minutes in, the settings that matter are the boring ones

A short clip forgives almost anything; a recorded lesson does not. By the third section, what keeps you in your place is where the reading line sits and how the type is set.

The reading line moves. The position of the line the prompter holds you on is adjustable. Set it near the top and your eyes stay closer to the lens for the whole hour; set it nearer the middle and you see more of what is coming, which suits a script full of lists and definitions.

Text size, side margins, line spacing and font weight adjust independently. Wider margins make shorter lines, and shorter lines mean less eye travel per sentence, which is what tires you out over a long take. Heavier weight holds up under a key light, and you can pinch to resize mid-take.

When a question sends you back three paragraphs, the take survives it: dragging the script lets you go and re-check the definition you passed, and in Voice reading picks you up again as soon as you speak. The recovery controls in full are on the voice teleprompter page.

The size you read at, saved with the script

The script carries its own text size, side margins, line spacing and font weight, and they are saved with that script rather than set once for the app. Pinch the script during a full-screen take to change the size mid-lesson, and it stays changed for next time. The pre-start screen is the real prompter surface, so you can pinch it there too, or drag it to read ahead before you start.

That is deliberately its own setting: what you read from a metre away, phone on a stand behind the laptop, is not what you read with the phone in your hand.

Stopping to answer a question, without touching anything

Lessons get interrupted. Say the pause command and the prompter stops where you are; say the continue one and it picks up. Another command goes back a sentence, one starts the script from the top and one jumps to the end. The phrases are editable per language. You talk to people for an hour, so set them to things you would never say to a class by accident.

Spoken commands work in ten languages: English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Turkish. The app’s six other interface languages have no command phrases, and the app says so.

The volume buttons move one sentence back or forward. They are marked Experimental, and they do not work inside camera apps, which take those buttons for the shutter.

Nothing counts you back in, either: in Voice and Sound modes the prompter waits until you speak again. The start delay is a separate setting, chosen before the take in any mode, and longer-form recording goes through it; for a class you teach live, see Zoom and Google Meet.

Bilingual lessons: three numbers that are not the same number

Three language numbers appear in the app, and they measure different things:

• The app’s interface is in 16 languages.
• Voice following works in every language your iPhone can recognise: 60+ locales on current iOS. It is the system recogniser, so the list depends on your iOS version and the language packs installed.
• Spoken commands are the ten languages above, and only those.

Reading aloud in a language the phone cannot recognise, say a set text in Latin or a dialect the recogniser mangles, is what Sound mode is for: it advances while it hears you speak, whatever the words are.

The question a school will ask

Recognition runs on your iPhone or iPad where your language supports it. Where it has no on-device model, your device sends the audio to Apple to convert it to text. The language picker marks those languages before a take starts; a full-screen notice can appear if on-device recognition repeatedly fails and the app falls back to Apple. Either way none of it comes to us: your scripts and their titles, the audio, the transcripts, the names of the files you import and anything you type are never sent to Wispim.

Usage statistics are not linked to you, processed in the EU, with one switch in Settings to turn them off. The privacy policy has the detail your data-protection lead will want.

Before you pay anything

Free with 6 prompter takes and unlimited scripts, and every prompter feature is in the free tier: Voice, Sound and Constant, the floating window, the spoken commands and the typography above. None of it is kept for Pro.

A term of lessons is more than 6 takes, and that is what Pro is for: it removes the limit and adds import from TXT, Markdown, PDF, DOCX and RTF, so the plan you already wrote becomes a script. Monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-off purchase.

Wispim runs on iPhone with iOS 16 or later, on iPad with iPadOS 16 or later and on Mac with macOS 13 or later.