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 — the thing that 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: Browse mode lets you go and re-check the definition you passed, and reading picks you up again as soon as you speak. The recovery controls in full are on the voice teleprompter page.

Dynamic Type, accessibility sizes included

The app’s own interface — the script list, the settings, the controls before a take — honours the system text size, including the accessibility sizes. If your iPhone runs large type because that is how you read, you do not have to turn it down to use the prompter.

The script itself is sized separately, on purpose: what you read from a metre away, phone on a stand behind the laptop, is not what you read in a settings screen.

Stopping to answer a question, without touching anything

Teaching is interrupted teaching. Say the pause command and the prompter stops where you are; say the continue one and it picks up, and you can jump between sentences the same way. 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 it says so rather than list commands that would do nothing.

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 simply waits until you speak again. Constant mode has a start delay instead, which longer-form recording goes through; for a class you teach live rather than record, see Zoom and Google Meet.

Bilingual lessons: three numbers that are not the same number

Language teachers get bitten by teleprompter marketing more than anyone:

• The app’s interface is in 16 languages, every screen of it.
• 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 — a set text in Latin, a dialect the recogniser mangles — is what Sound mode is for: it advances on the presence of your speech rather than on the words.

The question a school will ask

Recognition runs on your iPhone where your language supports it. Where it has no on-device model, iOS sends the audio to Apple to convert it to text — the language picker marks those languages before a take starts, and a banner tells you during one. 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.

Product analytics are pseudonymous rather than anonymous, 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 feature is in the free tier: Voice, Sound and Constant, the floating window, the spoken commands and the typography above. None of it is behind a paywall.

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

Wispim is an iPhone app, iOS 16 or later. No iPad or Mac version.